Why did a cowboy sell for $1.25 million?

Prince is not the only contemporary artist to have taken so-called "found photographs" - a loose term which encompasses everything from discarded prints discovered in a junk shop to old advertisements or amateur snaps from a stranger's family album - and reframed them as art. Two new exhibitions at London's Photographers' Gallery reveal how widely the trend has already spread.
@ The Telegraph

In 2005, Untitled (Cowboy), a photograph by the American artist Richard Prince, sold for $1,248,000 - the first time a photograph had broken the million-dollar barrier at auction. The work is nothing more than a picture of a Marlboro cigarette poster; a photograph of a photograph.

Prince is not the only contemporary artist to have taken so-called "found photographs" - a loose term which encompasses everything from discarded prints discovered in a junk shop to old advertisements or amateur snaps from a stranger's family album - and reframed them as art. Two new exhibitions at London's Photographers' Gallery reveal how widely the trend has already spread.

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