Original Obama poster by Shepard Fairey
A first print run of 350 was sold out within minutes for $ 45 a piece, and, much to Fairey's annoyance, resold on ebay for a lot more. Wall Street Journal began to track the ebay prices, they quickly shot up to $ 3'000, and reached $ 10'000 in June. In July, a mixed media painting done by Fairey in the same style as his "Hope" poster, sold for $ 108'000. By July 31, about 200'000 sticker versions of the original Obama poster had been printed.
Meanwhile, Fairey and his fans continued to wild post their Obamas all over the United States, and Fairey was promptly arrested, like many times before, and spent a night in jail. Ironically, this happened in Denver during the Democratic National Convention that won Obama the nomination of his party.
The strong, simple poster hit the nerve of many graphic designers. Fairey, who had been accused of copying style and content of communist propaganda posters, found himself suddenly imitated with numerous versions of his original design. Tutorials and plugins began to appear in the web on how to make your own Fairey/Obama poster, even ready made solutions where you can just enter your own text instead of HOPE.
Not all of the imitations are pro-Obama, some are below-the-belt, many require detailed knowledge of the campaign events or american folklore to be understandable, some, like the "Marxism" or the "Yes we can" are jewels of satyre, only a few are probably printed or displayed in the streets. Out of curiosity and fascination, I began to look for them in the web: www.thepeoplescube.com, www.obamaartreport.com and flickr are particularly rich sources. Many people also sent me links and explanations, thank you all!
Below are 149 posters inspired by the original Shepard Fairey poster at left. The authors are not always identifiable, but clicking on the picture will bring you to the page where I found it. Most of the persons depicted are in Wikipedia.
Barack Obama won the election on November 4, 2008.
