A 19-year-old Toronto woman wants a cut of the profits after a controversial U.S. artist took her Instagram photo, enlarged it and reportedly sold it for $90,000.

The photo, showing Anna Collins and her boyfriend hanging out in her bed, was part of a collection called “New Portraits” by Richard Prince, a New York-based artist known for taking other people’s works, making slight changes to them and then displaying them as his own. The collection was shown at New York’s Gagosian Gallery last year and was included in Frieze New York’s art fair in May.

“Appropriation without consent is not at all OK,” Collins told the Star in an email. “For an upper-class white man who felt entitled enough to take younger girls’ photos and sell them for a ridiculous amount of money, (it) strips us from the sense of security we have in the identity that we put out there.”

Prince did not respond to a request for comment from the Star, nor did the Gagosian Gallery.

“Honestly, I was just extremely confused at first. How he is even allowed to do that, but also why he would want to use one of my photos in his exhibit?” Collins said.

Collins, an aspiring ballet teacher who studied dance education at York University, said she realized she was in the collection when someone tagged her in an Instagram photo of the gallery in late 2014.

The photo shows Collins lying on top of her boyfriend, Fox Martindale, as the two looked at his computer. Collins’ photographer sister, Petra Collins — who became widely known when Instagram shut down her account after she posted a photo showing pubic hair poking out of a bikini — snapped the photo for fun a year and a half ago.

Anna said Petra gave her permission to post the photo on Instagram.

She said neither Prince nor the Gagosian Gallery contacted her about using her image. She has not tried to contact Prince.

All but one of Prince’s “New Portraits” works, priced at $90,000, sold at the Frieze art fair, according to Vulture.com.

Prince first became famous for photographing Marlboro cigarette advertisements and selling the photos in the 1980s.

His works sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars and have previously raised questions about copyright. In 2009, Prince was sued for copyright infringement by photographer Patrick Cariou, whose images he used in a 2008 series of paintings. A judge ruled against Prince but he appealed the decision and won.

Collins said she’s not interested in suing — and it might be her sister who would have to initiate a lawsuit, since she took the photos — but if she was, she could be in for an uphill battle.

“What I think he would argue is that these works are posted on the Internet and therefore they’re not a purely private image,” said Kevin Sartorio, an intellectual property litigation lawyer with the Gowlings law firm in Toronto. “He’s taking them and he’s using them in a way that transforms the subject matter and the content into something that is part of his protected free expression.”

Sartorio said the argument that Prince is transforming the work — in this case, blowing up and reprinting the Instagram images — might hold up in a U.S. court. But the fewer changes that are made to a work, the harder the case would be to argue, he said.

Instagram, meanwhile, doesn’t mince words about photo ownership.

“People in the Instagram community own their photos, period,” an Instagram spokesperson said in an email to the Star. “On the platform, if someone feels their copyright has been violated, they can report it to us and we will take appropriate action. Off the platform, content owners can enforce their legal rights.”

As for Collins, she is still frustrated and said she feels entitled to a portion of the profits from the sale of her image, which she said she would give to a charity helping women.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

She hopes that by speaking out she can send a message to the art world to stop commodifying women’s bodies for the sake of art.

“In some ways I feel powerless in this situation because I am a young woman. It is difficult for me to reclaim what is mine,” Collins said. “Just because a woman puts an image out publicly on her own forum, a man of power taking women’s photos and creating a profit off of it is in no way ‘fair game.’

“I just hope that some good comes out of this.”