Photography and the mythos of the American cowboy have been lassoed together almost from birth. Even when they weren’t working hand in hand, they were often in close company. The most famous showdown in the Old West, the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, took place not at the corral but six doors down in front of the photography studio of Camillus Fly. He was too busy ducking to take a picture but ran out with a Henry rifle as the shots died away and disarmed Billy Clanton, one of the outlaws in a gang called — yes — the Cowboys.

“Richard Prince: Cowboy,” a lavish, offbeat new book, just published by Prestel, uses photography to take a long look at the pervasive, at times pernicious, influence of the cowboy on movies, television, books, advertising and politics. The book is nominally devoted to the work of Mr. Prince, who rose to fame in the 1980s through his coy appropriation of the majestic cowboy pictures from Marlboro magazine ads. But as compiled and edited by the collector and curator Robert Rubin, the assemblage of art, ephemera and found imagery ends up feeling more like a ripsnorting syllabus for an American studies class that might have been team-taught by Sam Peckinpah and Margaret Mead.

Image “Richard Prince: Cowboy,” a new photo book, examines the cowboy as an American symbol. It includes writings by Western luminaries like Larry McMurtry, Louise Erdrich and Kinky Friedman. Credit... via Fulton Ryder; Ceara Nicholson

Mr. Rubin — who organized a 2011 exhibition at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris centered on Mr. Prince’s rare-book holdings — has been fixated on the West since growing up in a working-class family in suburban New Jersey. At Yale he wrote a research paper about Wyatt Earp’s influence on Hollywood. (Years after Earp’s famous turn at the O.K. Corral, in Tombstone, Ariz., he rambled around Los Angeles as an unpaid consultant for silent cowboy movies.)