A decade ago, Eric McNatt made a portrait of Kim Gordon for Paper magazine. He was paid $100. Working for Paper has never really been about the money; you get to do something cool with someone interesting, and it often pays off in other ways.
This portrait — black-and-white, austere but playful, with the rock star’s arms folded — instead led to him feeling like he was ripped off by a famous artist, Richard Prince, and betrayed by Gordon herself. What resulted was eight arduous, intrusive years of litigation ending in a $450,000 settlement from Prince to McNatt. I knew McNatt when we were much younger but I hadn’t seen him in decades.
Over those years, a career as a writer or photographer in what’s left of the magazine business had become a more or less volunteer activity for many. “I came in at the tail end of an industry where I got paid well for the work,” McNatt said. “I did for almost 15 years make a living as an editorial photographer.
But those days don’t exist anymore.” Around the time of the Pape r shoot, Prince, who became rich and famous appropriating other people’s images (Marlboro ads, pulp-novel covers, a skeevy nude portrait of an underaged Brooke Shields), had been introduced to Instagram by one of his school-age children. Prince had the idea that , to show how stupid we all are for being glued to our phones and showing off for each other, he would screengrab other people’s Instagram posts (most often they were of fetching young women), .
