Shepard Fairey is an American street artist, born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1970. He is the man behind the Obey Giant, a face first stuck on walls in Providence in 1989, and behind the red, beige and blue Obama "Hope" portrait of 2008. The portrait was made from a press photograph, without permission, and it ended with Fairey in a federal courtroom.
People search his name to find the poster, and then the trouble that came with it. The rest of his career asks the same question: what happens to an image once it leaves the person who made it?
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Fairey did not wait for permission to make the Obama poster, and he did not wait for the campaign to ask. In 2008 he printed 700 copies on his own. He sold 350 on his website for 45 dollars each and put the other 350 on the street, and that money paid for 10,000 more, mailed to places that had not yet voted in the primaries.
The campaign noticed. About a month after he made the image, Smithsonian magazine reports, Fairey received a letter of thanks from Obama, and the campaign asked for his help. Months later Obama told him, at a fundraiser in Los Angeles: "Wow, I love this image."
Then the Associated Press wrote to him. Fairey went to court first, and in his complaint he named the photograph he had worked from, a picture of Obama sitting beside George Clooney. It was not the one he had used. He knew it, and what he did next is what put him in front of a judge.
What You'll Discover
Why a student cut a wrestler's face.
What the poster cost to print.
What he told the court.
When the police came for him.
Why "sellout" is too easy.