This process of rephotographing continued into 1983, when his work Spiritual America featured Garry Gross's photo of Brooke Shields at the age of ten, standing in a bathtub, as an allusion to precocious sexuality and to the Alfred Stieglitz photograph by the same name.

The Wall Street Journal later reported that Prince's parents worked for the Office of Strategic Services in the Panama Canal before he was born.

The 1956 Time magazine article dubbing Pollock "Jack the Dripper" made the thought of pursuing art as career possible.

Prince has said that his attraction to New York was instigated by the famous photograph of Franz Kline gazing out the window of his 14th Street studio.

[12] In late 2007, Prince had a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, a comprehensive show hung in chronological order along the upward spiraling walls.

Maria Morris Hamburg, the curator of photography at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, asserted, "He is absolutely essential to what's going on today, he figured out before anyone else—and in a very precocious manner—how thoroughly pervasive the media is.

Other appropriation artists such as, Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, Vikky Alexander, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and Mike Bidlo also became prominent in the East Village in the 1980s.

Prince had very little experience with photography, but he has said in interviews that all he needed was a subject, the medium would follow, whether it be paint and brush or camera and film.

The court found that the use by Prince was not fair use (his primary defence), and Cariou's issue of liability for copyright infringement was granted in its entirety.

[19] On April 25, 2013, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed Judge Batts's ruling, stating that Prince's use of the photographs in 25 works was transformative and thus fair use.

[21] In 2014, Prince took one of Emily Ratajkowski's Instagram posts without her consent and included the image in his "New Portraits" exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in New York.

[28] Photographer Eric McNatt similarly sued Prince in 2016 for infringing on his copyright to his portrait of Kim Gordon, co-founder of the band Sonic Youth.

[34] Prince described his process in a 2003 interview by Steve Lafreiniere in Artforum: "I had limited technical skills regarding the camera.

"[38][39] Prince's rephotographs led to his series known as the Gangs, which followed the same technique of appropriating images from magazines as the Cowboys did, but now the subjects moved from advertisements and mass media toward niches in American society.

He depicted the bizarre in subcultures such as the motorcycle-obsessed, hot rod enthusiasts, surfers, and heavy metal music fans.

Prince's made his first Joke painting circa 1985, in New York, when he was living in the back room of 303 Gallery located on Park Avenue South.

An example of one of these peculiar combinations can be seen in his 1991 Good Revolution, which depicted black and white images of a male torso in boxing shorts set amongst doodles of a kitchen stove.

In the late 1980s, Prince, like his contemporaries Lorna Simpson and Barbara Kruger, as well as many of his Conceptual Art precursors, played with image and text in a strategy that was becoming increasingly popular.

"[40] Prince's jokes were primarily satirical one-liners, poking fun at topics such as religion, the relationship between husband and wife, his relations with women.

The jokes are simple, often relying on a punch line: "I took my wife to a wife-swapping party, I had to throw in some cash" or "I never had a penny to my name, so I changed my name."

Jokes became the complete subject of his prints, set atop monochromatic backgrounds red, orange, blue, yellow, etc.

Works are distinguishable from one another or identifiable as a particular artist, but with Prince's Monochromatic Jokes, we are presented with yellow text upon a blue background as in his 1989 Are You Kidding?

Following Warhol's lead, Prince would search out actors' headshots, promotional photographs which frequently lack copyright protection.

Prince began to seek out canceled checks from famous figures in history ranging from Jack Kerouac to Andy Warhol.

Prince scanned the covers of the books on his computer and used inkjet printing to transfer the images to canvas, and then personalized the pieces with acrylic paint.

In 2007, Prince collaborated with the fashion designer Marc Jacobs on his Spring 2008 collection for the French label Louis Vuitton.

[44][45] An untitled work consists of the body of a 1970 Dodge Challenger and high-performance parts such as a 660 hp Hemi engine, custom interior, black wheel wells, 14-inch tires in the front and 16 inch in the back, a pale orange paint job with a flat black T/A hood, as well as various decals and emblems.

Another car sculpture, called American Prayer, is a 1968 Dodge Charger that has been completely emptied of any engine parts and interiors and is stripped of any paint and then powder coated.

[3] In Untitled (Covering Pollock), a series of 27 works made between 2009 and 2011, Prince printed black-and-white photos of Jackson Pollock taken by Hans Namuth on canvas and pasted grids of photographs showing Sid Vicious, Kate Moss, Stephanie Seymour and pornographic imagery on top.

[47][48] "Possible cogent responses to the show include naughty delight and sheer abhorrence", wrote art critic Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker.