Shepard Fairey

Provenance:  Private collection

The Barack Obama “Hope” poster is an image of Barack Obama designed by artist Shepard Fairey, which was widely described as iconic and came to represent his 2008 presidential campaign.^[1][2] It consists of a stylized stencil portrait of Obama in solid red, beige and (light and dark) blue, with the word “progress”, “hope” or “change” below (and other words in some versions).

The design was created in one day and printed first as a street poster. It was then more widely distributed—both as a digital image and other paraphernalia—during the 2008 election season, initially independent of, but with the approval from, the official Obama campaign. The image became one of the most widely recognized symbols of Obama’s campaign message, spawning many variations and imitations, including some commissioned by the Obama campaign. This led The Guardian’sLaura Barton to proclaim that the image “acquired the kind of instant recognition of Jim Fitzpatrick’s Che Guevara poster, and is surely set to grace T-shirts, coffee mugs and the walls of student bedrooms in the years to come.”

In January 2009, after Obama had won the election, Fairey’s mixed-media stenciled portrait version of the image was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution for its National Portrait Gallery. Later in January 2009, the photograph on which Fairey based the poster was revealed: a June 2006 shot by former Associated Press freelance photographer Mannie Garcia. In response to claims by the Associated Press for compensation, Fairey sued for a declaratory judgment that his poster was a fair use of the original photograph. The parties settled out of court in January 2011, with details of the settlement remaining confidential.