During President Obama’s campaign for the presidency in 2008, an artist named Shepard Fairey created a poster depicting Obama looking up, his face illuminated in red, white, and blue, that famous Obama “sunset” campaign logo in the form of a button fastened to his lapel, with “hope” in capital letters emblazoned along the bottom of the poster. This poster became an iconic image of not just Obama, but of his historic campaign as well. Brandished onto everything from t-shirts to mugs to tins of mints, Fairey’s artwork became not only a symbol of Obama, but also an iconic image, as the poster reminds people of his historic campaign and what seemed like an almost revolutionary time for America.
However, in early 2009, The Associated Press (AP) claimed that Fairey had infringed on copyright laws, for the portrait he created was rendered from an image taken by the AP. But after finally admitting to actually using the AP image as the basis for his picture, Fairey claimed that under the doctrine of fair use, he had done nothing wrong because he had not intended to use the image the same way in which the AP had, and also he substantially altered the image. I thought that this meshed well with our in-class discussion regarding copyright, creativity, and originality. Whether or not Fairey was operating within the doctrine of fair use or illegally breaching the AP’s copyright is a subject of much debate, and the case is still ongoing.
What I found most interesting about the Fairey poster comes from its juxtaposition with the original photo taken by the Associated Press. This comparison illustrates that contextualization greatly affects how people see, perceive, and interpret what Sturken and Cartwright say are the “historically and contextually produced” (39) meanings of images. For instance, the photo alone (which can be seen in link below) taken by the AP does not really mean anything—it is just one of the innumerable images of President Obama that have been taken over the course of the last few years. It has no context in which we can specifically place it—just a picture of Obama looking up toward something, stationed in front of an American flag. But in the portrait that Fairey created, the word “HOPE” gives the image a context, and the button on Obama’s lapel gives the image context, a meaning, and an association. Now, what is almost an unreadable facial expression in the photo is transformed in Fairey’s poster into one of ferocious integrity, struggle, and hope.
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