By Daryl Lang

It was bound to happen eventually: A photographer has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against artist Richard Prince.

French photographer Patrick Cariou has filed a lawsuit over a series of Prince collage paintings that were displayed recently at the Gagosian Gallery in New York. Cariou claims Prince’s “Canal Zone” series illegally borrows photographs from his book Yes Rasta.

Throughout his career, Prince has used borrowed images in his artwork. He has occasionally drawn criticism from photographers whose images he has used without permission, but no photographer has ever sued him.

Cariou filed a suit in a U.S. federal court in December against Prince, the Gagosian Gallery, gallery owner Lawrence Gagosian and book publisher Rizzoli, which handled a book connected to the gallery show.

The suit accuses all parties of copyright infringement and seeks unspecified damages. It also asks to have the unsold paintings and books impounded or destroyed, and for the plaintiffs to notify owners of sold paintings that it is illegal to display the work.

Cariou and Rizzoli Publications declined to comment for this story. PDN made several efforts to contact Prince and the Gagosian Gallery and will update this story if they respond.

Cariou’s book on Rastafarian culture, Yes Rasta, was published by powerHouse Books in 2000 and includes about 100 black-and-white photographs. The book was registered with the Copyright Office in 2001, according to the lawsuit. The suit says Cariou spent ten years living with Rastafarians in the mountains of Jamaica.

The lawsuit says at least 20 of the 22 collages in the Prince exhibition used Cariou’s photos. Based on a few sample photographs from the Yes Rasta book available online and images of Prince’s work posted on the Gagosian Gallery Web site, PDN spotted two examples of a Cariou photo reproduced in a Prince painting. The Prince works also include images of naked women that aren't from Cariou's book.

The lawsuit cites an Interview magazine article in which Prince discusses creating art based on a book he picked up about Rastas: “It's a very defined type of culture that I didn't really know much about. But I loved the look, and I loved the dreads, so I just started fooling around with this book, drawing it like I did with the de Kooning paintings.”

Press materials from the Gagosian gallery also say Prince used images “scanned from originals,” or cut out and pasted onto canvas with paint.

Cariou says he learned of the infringement after the exhibit opened in New York and sent a cease-and-desist letter to the gallery on December 11, 2008. The gallery kept the show open until its scheduled closing date of December 20.

Should the case go to trial, it could produce another decision on the subject of fair use, an unsettled area of copyright law.

The Cariou case is similar to a 2003 lawsuit by photographer Andrea Blanch against artist Jeff Koons. Koons used a photograph of a woman’s legs as part of a painted collage, and Blanch sued Koons for copyright infringement. A federal court awarded a decision in favor Koons, saying his work is transformative and fair use. An appeals court affirmed the decision in 2006. Koons has also lost three infringement lawsuits related to his art.

Prince’s best known work is his "Cowboy" series: large, photographic prints of cropped Marlboro cigarette ads that can fetch millions of dollars at auction. Two photographers, Sam Abell and Jim Kranz, have accused Prince of using image they shot for Marlboro, but neither they nor the cigarette maker Philip Morris has sued Prince.

Source document
The case is Cariou v. Prince et al., in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. View a PDF of the lawsuit on the PDNPulse blog.

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