FIU Communications Discussion

After reviewing and reading this case study, find a social movement or political image to discuss. It can be an image or symbol that attempts to persuade. Write a 2-3 paragraph reflection analyzing:

the image,

what it represents, and

how it follows the principles of visual rhetoric and communication.

6
Copyright © 2015. Utah State University Press. All rights reserved.
OBAMA HOPE, PRESIDENTIAL
I C O N O G R A P H Y, A N D
THE 2008 ELECTION
The rhetorical life of Obama Hope is a complicated story with a humble beginning. As identified in the book’s introduction, the image first
actualized in one among hundreds of photos taken by Mannie Garcia
at a national press conference in April of 2006 (see Figure 1.1). This
photograph only appeared in a few online news sources and personal
blogs between 2006 and early 2008. While it was intended to document
the actual press conference, the Obama photo mostly served another
purpose. In some online news sources, such as Star Media Noticias, the
Obama photo depicts the relatively unknown senator from Illinois as a
contender for the 2008 Democratic Party presidential nominee. In others, it offers a visual comparison to his opponents, Hillary Clinton and
John McCain. Typical of news photos taken during an election season,
then, Obama Hope initially helped online readers visualize the potential presidential candidate reading about him in the accompanying
text. Because of its limited function and circulation, Obama Hope was
largely inconsequential at the beginning of its life—an image, perhaps,
doomed to be archived and lost among thousands of other news photos
taken that year. In early 2008, however, that all changed when street artist and graphic designer, Shepard Fairey, located Garcia’s Obama photo
on Google Images. This encounter proved to be an important one as
it jumpstarted Obama Hope’s journey to becoming a cultural icon, a
national symbol, and a dynamic actant with a rich rhetorical life.
Shepard Fairey is a Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) graduate who up until 2008 was most famous for his Obey sticker campaign
(see Figure 6.1). This campaign, according to Fairey’s (1990) manifesto, started as an experiment in phenomenology intended to achieve
three goals: trigger the viewer’s curiosity; evoke questions about what
this ambiguous sign means to and requests of the viewer; and challenge
the viewer to confront their own obedience. Fairey’s Obey stickers are
DOI: 10.7330/9780874219784.c006
Gries, L. (2015). Still life with rhetoric : A new materialist approach for visual rhetorics. ProQuest Ebook Central http://ebookce
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Figure 6.1. Obey Icon, Shepard
Fairey, 1995. Courtesy of Shepard
Fairey-ObeyGiant.com.
plastered all over the globe and have received mass amounts of attention. While not all may agree, Sarah Jaye William argues that the Obey
sticker—a fixture at many urban and rural street corners—has become
“an incitement for the uninitiated masses . . . to begin questioning
and distrusting the images and slogans they face on daily basis” (Fairey
2009a, 12). At the very least, the Obey sticker campaign has inspired
others to create their own sticker campaigns and has thus promoted the
rhetorical value of this medium.
Fairey, especially now, is not just famous for the Obey campaign. After
graduating from RISD, Fairey launched a small printing press called
Alternative Graphics, where he designed t-shirts and stickers with various original designs. Eventually, Fairey started Studio Number One—a
design agency that produces books, album covers, and other commercial work as well as promotional materials for nonprofit organizations and fund-raising materials for charity events. On his Obey Giant
website, Fairey also sells a number of designs that appropriate older
forms of propaganda to create new forms for contemporary contexts.
As Fairey (2009a) explains, his work—what W.J.T. Mitchell would call
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Obama Hope, Presidential Iconography, and the 2008 Election
137
“image-texts”—“uses people, symbols, and people as symbols to deconstruct how powerful visuals and emotionally potent phrases can be used
to manipulate and indoctrinate” (139). Fairey especially likes to refashion images that have already had a history of their own (see Figures
6.2 and 6.3) to demonstrate not only how easy it is to manipulate symbols for different purposes but also how people can be “reconditioned
through imagery” (99).
In this sense, Fairey is a quintessential example of Generation X
media activists. According to Douglass Rushkoff (1996), Generation
Xers are the first generation to grow up knowing they could manipulate
digital technologies and already-circulating images in the media to influence reality. As such, this generation is preoccupied with deconstructing
and reexamining media and engaging in the techniques of recycling,
juxtaposing, and recontextualizing existing imagery to activate change
(32). In this context—what Lawrence Lessig (2004) might name a “readwrite culture”—Fairey can be considered a productive activist in that he
has developed a unique style of remixing older imagery to generate new
visual designs. He also knows how to distribute those visual things so
they are widely visible. Fairey often wheatpastes posters, paints murals,
or plasters stickers of his work in cities around the world—a transgressive act that has resulted in some physical altercations and numerous
arrests over his lifetime. Yet increasingly many of his images can also be
observed in art galleries and books. In 2009, for instance, an art exhibit
called Obey: Supply and Demand traveled across the United States accompanied by a retrospective book celebrating the twentieth anniversary of
the Obey Giant project. With his work continuing to be shown in art galleries at the same time it is still popping up on streets around the world,
Fairey has, in many people’s eyes, become one of the most influential
contemporary street artists of his generation.
As evident in Greetings from Iraq and in much of the work in Obey,
many of Fairey’s designs are rhetorical in intent and work for political
change. Titles of his work exemplify this rhetorical purpose. Big Brother
Is Watching You (2007), Two Sides of Capitalism (2007), and War for Sale
(2007) are just a few among many works that critique the political status quo. Such images are colored in intense hues of red and black and
designed in the streamlined graphic style of the Russian Constructivist
poster—a minimalist style of dynamic compositions with geometric
lines, powerful typefaces, and blaring slogans that have come to define
Fairey’s subversive art. Designed with the revolutionary purpose of agitating the viewer and (re)constructing society, Fairey has produced
a number of portraits in this style, which, in depicting dictators such
Gries, L. (2015). Still life with rhetoric : A new materialist approach for visual rhetorics. ProQuest Ebook Central http://ebookce
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Figure 6.2. Yellowstone
National Park, National Park
Service, 1938. Courtesy of
Library of Congress.
Figure 6.3. Greetings from Iraq,
Shepard Fairey, 2005. Courtesy of
Shepard Fairey-ObeyGiant.com.
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Obama Hope, Presidential Iconography, and the 2008 Election
139
as Che Guevara, Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung, warn viewers against blind
obedience to political leaders. US politicians have not been spared as
targets in Fairey’s critiques. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, for
instance, have received their fair share of attention, but George W. Bush
has, perhaps, been hit the hardest. In Fairey’s designs for a 2004 antiBush campaign, for instance, President Bush is depicted not only as a
bloodthirsty vampire but also as a modern-day version of Hitler. While
such critiques are typical for Fairey, Obama inspired Fairey to change
gears with his political activism and move from negative critique to positive support. Fairey’s desire to create art to work for positive political
change emerged when Obama ran for president. Obama offered Fairey
a glimpse of a new era of politics—a politics of hope and progress. In
the belief that Obama could offer the United States a brighter future,
Fairey wanted to design a poster to help Obama win the 2008 presidential election. When searching for a reference to be used in this political
poster, Fairey located Garcia’s Obama photo on Google Images a couple of weeks before Super Tuesday (February 5, 2008). In this moment,
Obama Hope, as we know it, stepped onto the rhetorical stage.
Obama Hope, like many other things, did not come into this world
because of the desires or work of a lone artist, however. While his own
motivation to help Obama get into office was a catalyst for his Google
search, Fairey’s actions were also motivated by publicist Yosi Sergant and
others intent on making sure Republicans did not gain the presidential
seat again after being in the White House for eight years (see Figure
6.4). Sergant helped found 008themovement.org—a Los Angeles-based
grassroots organization consisting of young professionals with extensive
experience in the entertainment industry and in politics. This group,
as reported by James Kaelan, formed right after Bush was elected a second time in 2004 with aims to work for Democratic mobilization. From
2004 to 2007, Sergant and other organization members had been making plans to launch a political, visual assault on Republicans. When 2007
arrived and they suspected that every state would be a close call, they
realized a viral campaign would be necessary. This assault, they realized,
could come in the form of pro-Obama posters to be disseminated in
battleground precincts across the United States (Kaelan 2009).
Around Halloween of 2007 at an Adidas event, Sergant is reported1 as
striking up a conversation with Fairey about who Fairey was supporting
for president. Sergant “saw an opportunity” (qtd. in Kaelan 2009) and,
according to Fairey, “thought it would be cool if [he] did something
for Obama” (qtd. in Arnon 2008). By this time, Sergant had teamed
up with Jennifer Gross’s Evolutionary Media Group, which served as
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Figure 6.4. Yosi Sergant with Hope Posters, Lite-Bright Idea, 2008. Photograph Courtesy of
Yosi Sergant.
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Obama Hope, Presidential Iconography, and the 2008 Election
141
media consultant to the Obama campaign. However, Seven McDonald
(2009) from LAWeekly (September 11, 2009) reported that when Fairey
approached Sergant the next day about his idea for producing a poster,
“Sergant immediately realized the power an iconic image by Fairey
could have and decided that he and Evolutionary Media Group could be
more effective if they worked outside the confines of the official Obama
campaign.” Sergant thus teamed up with Fairey instead. “If Fairey would
do a poster,” he reasoned, “008themovement.org had both its virus and
a population of self-selected hosts—namely Fairey’s worldwide base of
volunteer vandals who had been for years postering cities around the
globe with Fairey’s satirical propaganda” (Kaelan 2009).
Before moving forward with production, Fairey apparently hesitated,
asking Sergant if the campaign would approve of a street artist such as
himself creating and distributing a political poster of Obama. Fairey typically does not consult or gain permission from anyone to make social
commentary via his artwork. However, as Fairey (2009a) explained, “I’m
a street artist who’s been arrested fifteen times, and I didn’t want to be
a liability to Obama’s cause. I didn’t want him to be seen as a radical
or too outside the mainstream just because someone like me chose to
support him.” Therefore, in early December, Fairey broached the topic
again with Hill Harper, a personal acquaintance of Obama’s, and two
weeks before Super Tuesday (February 5, 2008), Fairey received the goahead from Sergant (Arnon 2008) and, according to Fairey, presumably
from “the highest levels” of Obama’s campaign (qtd. in Booth 2009).
The next day, Fairey designed Obama Progress—the first design in the
Obama Works series that would widely circulate during the 2008 presidential election and into the inauguration (see Figure 6.5). It is in this
rendition that Obama Hope first appeared to the public in its most recognizable manifestation.
T H E O BA M A WO R K S 2
The Progress poster is an abstract rendition of Garcia’s photograph of
Barack Obama presented in a palette of reds, blues, and off-whites.
The exact design and production steps taken to produce the Progress
poster have been made public in “Reflections on the Hope Poster
Case” published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology (Fisher et
al. 2012). While quite involved, this process is fascinating. According to
Fairey, he wanted to create a portrait “that was political in nature and
that would deracialize Mr. Obama [by using] a red, white, and blue
color palette that was patriotic.” In addition, he wanted to “capture
Gries, L. (2015). Still life with rhetoric : A new materialist approach for visual rhetorics. ProQuest Ebook Central http://ebookce
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Figure 6.5. Obama Progress,
Shepard Fairey, 2008. Courtesy of
Shepard Fairey-ObeyGiant.com.
Figure 1.1. Photograph of Barack
Obama, Mannie Garcia, 2006.
Permissions from the Associated
Press.
Figure 1.2. Obama Hope, Shepard
Fairey, 2008. Courtesy of Shepard
Fairey-ObeyGiant.com.
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Obama Hope, Presidential Iconography, and the 2008 Election
143
a pose in Mr. Obama that was a classic political pose, something that
would elevate him to iconic status in the vein of people who had [preceded] him and were held in high regard in politics” (qtd. in Fisher
et al. 2012). He thus set out on a Google Images search with key terms
such as Obama or Barack Obama to find a reference picture for his
work that would depict Obama in a “three-quarters view” (Fisher at
al. 2012). After locating Garcia’s photograph on January 22, he began
manipulating this picture in Photoshop by converting it to grayscale,
cropping the photograph, blurring background images, and changing
lighting to create more definition and contrast. He also generated four
bitmaps in Photoshop, to each of which he assigned a particular color
in Adobe Illustrator in order to create the layers of color for his final
poster. After integrating these layers into a composite sketch to see
what the final design would look like, he printed them out on blackand-white paper, which he used as a guide to cut rubylith—a masking
film that has a red or orange gelatin on top of a clear surface that
looks much like a transparency. Apparently, these sheets of rubylith
were cut out for each layer of color in the illustration, then scanned
into Photoshop and imported into Adobe Illustrator, where Fairey
performed further editing such as adding color to layers, cutting back
their edges, and adding final design touches.3
With portraits, Fairey does not change much in terms of facial features and body position so he can retain a recognizable image of the
person. In the Progress poster, for example, the American flag in behind
Obama in Garcia’s photograph was omitted and replaced with a blue
and red background, each receiving equal weight. Beneath Obama’s
face, the word progress, printed in all capital letters, was added in a sans
serif Gotham font. A lapel pin with Fairey’s Obey logo was added to
Obama’s suit, and Obama’s tie appears red rather than blue. In addition, the color of Obama’s skin in the Progress poster appears in red,
white and blue tones that have come to dominate all of the Obama
Works. However, little else in terms of content changed. Even the exact
shadow lines on Obama’s face captured in Garcia’s photograph were
left unchanged. Because of such concerted efforts to stick close to the
reference photo when creating portraits, there was little chance viewers
would not recognize Barack Obama in Fairey’s posters if they were at all
familiar with what Obama looked like.
Once the Progress poster was finished, Fairey got busy producing the
next poster in the Obama Works Series—the Obama Hope design (see
Figure 1.2). The Hope poster replicated the Progress poster but transformed it in two ways. First, the word hope replaced the word progress.
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Fairey claimed in an interview with Jeff Beer that he actually preferred
the word progress. “[I]t’s more about the action,” he says, “it’s a verb,
the realization of that hope” (qtd. in Beer 2008). But he changed the
word progress to hope because hope is the message the campaign wanted
to push (Beer 2008). Second, the official Obama campaign logo was
inserted on Obama’s lapel pin, which in the Progress poster had contained Fairey’s Obey star logo. While some people accused Fairey of trying to highjack Obama’s credibility in the Progress poster by inserting his
own logo onto Obama’s lapel pin, Fairey claims that he added his logo
to the Progress poster “because [he] knew that [his] hard core collectors
would feel they had to buy the poster just because it had an Obey logo.
Therefore, [he] was more or less forcing [his] audience to fund further
perpetuation of the image” (Arnon 2008). Presumably, Fairey changed
the Obey star logo in the poster into the Obama campaign logo to fit
more closely with the state and nationwide official Obama campaign.
During the remainder of the 2008 election, the distribution process
of Obama Hope was multifaceted, dependent not only on deliberate
guerilla distribution tactics and an online sales plan created by the official Obama campaign, but also on unforeseeable grassroots participation by concerned Obama supporters around the United States. Wide
distribution was not difficult to achieve for Fairey and Sergant. Fairey
has been quoted as being “the foremost biological engineer in the
world of virally spread guerilla art” (Kaelan 2009), evidence of which is
provided by his work having a visible presence on six continents, made
possible through Fairey’s unique graffiti-style distribution techniques.
Sergant had realized he could make use of Fairey in their encounter
at the Adidas event in October 2007 and, being what Malcom Gladwell
would call the maven and connector that he was, Sergant was convinced
Fairey would be a strong asset to the grassroots campaign. Sergant’s intuition proved right. The deliberate distribution tactics Sergant, Fairey,
and a network of volunteers deployed enabled Obama Hope to spread
like a virus across the fifty states.
The distribution network that contributed to the spread of Obama
Hope in relation to Fairey’s Obama Works can be thought of as a complex, emergent ecosystem. As will become clear in the next section, a
dynamic intra-action among a number of people, technologies, and
structures involved in interlaminated activities in multiple environments enabled Obama Hope to circulate widely across a variety of mediums, forms, genres, and locations. The human actors involved included
designers, artists, magazine editors, reporters, politicians, digital consultants, and everyday citizens, among others. The contributing nonhuman
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Obama Hope, Presidential Iconography, and the 2008 Election
145
actors included websites, blogs, social media sites, and digital photo
technologies, among a diverse array of others entities ranging from ink
to paper to printing machines. The intra-actions among various actors
that contributed to the reproduction, transformation, distribution and
redistribution of Obama Hope were thus multifaceted. While Fairey
and Sergant implemented a top-down approach, a bottom-up approach
also emerged as smaller networks of distributed activity contributed to
the larger network and enabled wide distribution and viral circulation
of the Obama Works. As with all complex systems, the self-organizing,
adaptive, dynamic, and often seemingly simultaneous intra-actions that
ensued could never have been fully predicted. However, these intraactions, both anticipated and unanticipated, helped generate one of the
most iconic images that has surfaced in recent years in the national if
not the global arena.
Copyright © 2015. Utah State University Press. All rights reserved.
I N I T I A L D I S T R I B U T I O N TA C T I C S
As this section will make evident, Fairey and Sergant deployed clever and
effective tactics to spread the Obama Works widely across the United
States. To set rhetorical velocity in motion, Fairey made a free, highresolution download of the Progress poster available in black and white
on his Obey Giant website, which gave broad access to the Obama Hope
image and created potential for it to rematerialize and transform. Within
a short time of uploading the Progress poster, for instance, people were
downloading the picture and using it as email signatures or Facebook
profile pictures. People were also printing the poster and taping it up in
their offices and outside metro stations, among other locales, proliferating Obama Hope in ways and places that one single organization could
not achieve on its own. In St. Louis, for instance, Richard Rodriguez
downloaded the PDF from Fairey’s website and projected the picture
onto 9 × 6-foot canvas paint cloths he purchased from Home Depot.
He then traced the image and painted it with Behr house paint, spending quite a bit of money from his own pocket as well as funds donated
by other Obama supporters and sales from some of his reproductions
at a gallery opening (see Figure 6.6). Rodriguez’s first installation was a
series of Progress, Hope, and Change canvases hanging side by side on the
outside wall of the Royale in St. Louis. But in total, Rodriguez and other
volunteers hung a total of seventy-eight large format pictures around
St. Louis, which included lending them out to campaign offices, other
media functions, and even large house parties aiming to generate support for Obama.
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Figure 6.6. Obama Royale by Richard Rodriguez, 2008. Photograph Courtesy of Jane
Ollendorff.
In Dayton, Ohio, David Esrati, owner of an ad agency, also took
it upon himself to print and distribute the Hope poster. As Esrati
explained, he downloaded a small JPEG from Fairey’s website. Using
a plugin for Photoshop, he created a vector file, which he printed on
paper with his 42-inch HP printer. Esrati hung one poster in his own
design agency window but also gave the campaign headquarters in
Dayton a poster (see Figure 6.7). In addition, he gave one of his prints
to Miami County Democrats for a demonstration they were hosting in
the same square where Bush had spoken a few years earlier. After taking down his poster from the campaign headquarters at the end of
the primary, Esrati, who was running for Congress at the time, held an
election-night party where, with permission from Fairey, he auctioned
off the print for charity, raising $200 for a local runaway shelter. Despite
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Figure 6.7. Hope Poster in Dayton, 2008. Photograph Courtesy of David Esrati.
his intentions for wide distribution, when Fairey made the PDFs freely
available for reprint, he never anticipated that so many varied uptakes of
the posters would emerge nor the magnitude with which Obama Hope
would go viral (Cohen 2008; Gambino 2009).
Of course, Fairey’s distribution tactics did not stop there. In addition to making the PDFs free to the public, Fairey also generated funds
from sales of his posters to mass produce more campaign materials,
efforts that put Obama Hope into circulation in a variety of mediums.
Fairey initially put a limited edition of 350 Progress posters up for sale on
his website for forty-five dollars each and printed another 350 on thin
paper to be distributed and wheatpasted on the streets. He also put up
1,400 of the 350,000 Hope posters he would eventually produce up for
sale for thirty-five dollars (Fisher et al. 2012). According to Fairey, the
proceeds from the poster sales, which sold out within minutes, funded
the production of more posters. Fairey also noticed that almost immediately, his artwork was selling on eBay for over $1,000; therefore, he sold
a few limited-edition prints to private collectors to raise more money to
print posters and stickers for distribution.4 In addition, Fairey granted
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Figure 6.8. Obama Hope Stickers in Production, 2008. Photograph Courtesy of Yosi
Sergant.
a free nonexclusive license to organizations that supported Obama and
granted a free license to Sticker Robot to produce and distribute, at cost,
large numbers of stickers bearing the Obama Hope image. In February
2008, Fairey also teamed up with Upper Playground to make t-shirts
with the Hope poster image. Upper Playground—considered a leader in
the US progressive art movement through its pioneering apparel line
and popular art gallery—made the shirts available for sale for twentyfive dollars at Upper Playground stores, including its online store. All
proceeds went to creating more campaign t-shirts, posters, and stickers
in support of Obama (see Figure 6.8). Soon, these items were popping
up not only in the United States but also across the globe. For instance,
one Flickr member identified as Hellblazer! proudly announced that
his Hope t-shirt arrived in his mailbox in Melbourne, Australia, as early
as March 2008.
Many of Fairey’s posters were also donated to local campaign headquarters and auctioned off at fundraising events to help raise funds for
Obama’s campaign. Many individuals in Los Angeles took it upon themselves to purchase posters from local campaign headquarters and hang
them up in their own yards, increasing the visibility of Obama Hope.
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Obama Hope, Presidential Iconography, and the 2008 Election
149
And Fairey himself teamed up with others to throw fundraising events.
For instance, Fairey and DJ Z-Trip hosted a couple of Party for Change
fundraising events in Los Angeles and San Francisco. To attract people
to the events, the first arrivals to the party were guaranteed to receive a
Hope poster. Yet other Obama supporters also organized events and used
the Obama Works to raise funds for Obama. On September 23, 2008, for
example, the Barack Obama-rama was held at Spaceland in Silver Lake,
California. At this event, the Obama campaign set up a booth and a voterregistration drive. Hope posters donated by Fairey hung over the main
stage and around the event space, and many were raffled off to generate funds for the Obama campaign. That night alone raised over $4,000
(Koga 2008). Two nights later in West Hollywood, Magda Rod held an
Obama or Bust fundraising party at an ecochique boutique on Melrose
Avenue. Not only could you bid on an original Progress screenprint, but
you could also buy limited editions of Fairey’s Hope posters. Signed posters were available for one hundred dollars, unsigned for fifty dollars.
According to Rod (2010), this event raised over $10,000 with much of
this money generated by Fairey’s work alone. As the poster transformed
in function from simply a political poster to a productive fund-raising
vehicle, Obama Hope’s circulation escalated, as did, obviously, its financial contribution to the Obama campaign.
Another mass-distribution strategy, enacted just days after the Progress
and Hope posters were created, entailed using volunteers to distribute
the Hope poster at political rallies and on urban streets in California
and across the United States. James Kaelan (2009) reports, for example,
that Sergant was at a rally at the Avalon Club in Los Angeles distributing the Hope poster as early as January 31, 2008. The poster gained
almost instant popularity with the crowd. When speaking about hope
during his speech, in fact, Obama pointed to Sergant holding the Hope
poster and said, “Very nice graphic, by the way,” which prompted huge
applause from members of the crowd already familiar with the picture
(Kaelan 2009). That moment, Sergant explains, proved to him that the
guerrilla campaign was working; the Hope poster was “perfectly in sync”
with Obama’s message (Kaelan 2009). Mass distribution was intensified
in Los Angeles and across California, obviously to make Obama Hope
as highly visible as possible. At the UCLA rally, Sergant himself was “running up and down the aisles rolling up posters and sticking them in the
hands of people in the bleachers who would be in the camera shot”
(Arnon 2008). Meanwhile, in Los Angeles and San Francisco, as documented by members of the Obama Street Art group, Obama Hope posters were being pasted on building walls and stuck to metal transformer
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Figure 6.9. Shepard Fairey’s Hope Poster in Downtown Los Angeles, 2008. Photograph
Courtesy of Sam Neira.
boxes (see Figure 6.9). Fairey himself put up billboard-sized wheatpastes
at locations such as Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood Boulevard, and Echo
Park in Los Angeles, which he would also do later in cities such as
Denver and Washington, DC (see Figure 6.10). With time, nearly three
hundred thousand posters and stickers would be printed and distributed across the United States.
Mass distribution was made possible via volunteer participation by
using several different connectors’ abilities to build social networks
around them. Fairey and Sergant were two such connectors; as Fairey
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Figure 6.10. Shepard in DC, 2008. Photograph Courtesy of Yosi Sergant.
explained, by January of 2008 he had a list of three thousand people
who wanted to help distribute the poster. Fairey and Sergant mailed
posters out to people in places where the primaries or caucuses hadn’t
yet taken place. For instance, on February 25 alone, one thousand
t-shirts and over ten thousand posters were sent to Obama supporters in
Ohio and Texas to promote Obama’s bid in their primary elections. But
other connectors also played an important role in distributing the Hope
posters. In describing his goal to get Obama elected, Sergant explained
in a Radaronline.com feature article, “I’m gonna make sure anyone who
wants one [a Fairey poster] at the University of Arizona has one available
to them. I’m going to make sure anyone who’s living in Florida who’s
a Barack Obama supporter has one available to them if they want it. If
they need any piece of material to show their support and it may just
convince one more person to vote for Barack Obama, it is our objective
to make sure they have it” (qtd. in 4Rilla 2008).
To meet this objective, Sergant distributed the Hope posters to connectors within key voting states. In Philadelphia, for instance, Tayyib
Smith, the creator of 215 Magazine discussed in chapter 2, played a significant role in getting out Obama Hope posters and stickers. Smith was
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motivated to help not only by his anti-Bush sentiment but also by his
desire for real change, which he believed Obama could bring to the
country, as well as by his desire to participate in bringing about change.
Smith began receiving pallets of posters six to eight weeks before the
primaries in Pennsylvania. With much experience in event networking
and promotion, Smith himself passed out Fairey posters in coffee shops,
at music events, and in other noncorporate spaces. He also dropped off
the posters at Obama’s official campaign offices in Philadelphia. Smith
also arranged for his employees and small group of friends to pass out
posters, but, unexpectedly, family members and friends of friends soon
began volunteering to distribute posters. Smith’s father, for instance,
targeted specific neighborhoods in Philadelphia while office janitors
in Smith’s office building covered rural Pennsylvania neighborhoods.
Smith explains (pers. comm.) that the network just spiraled out as each
individual took their own initiative to spread posters. Together, working
as a collective, Smith and others distributed thousands of Fairey posters.
This self-organizing network was just one among many that assembled to contribute to the dynamic system that enabled the Obama Hope
image to spread. While some, such as Smith’s network, assembled as a
direct result of Sergant’s and Fairey’s intended actions, others assembled on their own accord. Obama Hope especially inspired craftspeople
to take up the image to work for political change. As is evident in photographs uploaded on Flickr by members of the Obama Craft Project
group, throughout the entire election year, people were printing,
sewing, and stitching the Obama Hope image onto various crafts for
their own personal satisfaction as well as to help spread Obama’s message. The Obama Hope image, for instance, was needlepointed onto
cloth canvases, glazed onto pottery, tiled into mosaic prints, and crocheted onto women’s bags. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly
in the craft world, people did not just make Obama crafts for their own
sakes. Instead, several people made their designs available for others to
reproduce.
Such availability created layers and layers of the Obama Hope image’s
reproduction, intensified the image’s transformation across media, and
contributed to the emergence of new associations between Obama Hope
and various entities. In October of 2008, for instance, a Screen Printing
for Change party was held in which friends came together and made
their own t-shirts with the Obama Hope image printed in black and colored ink. Patterns for knitting the Obama Hope image onto sweaters
were also made available for free downloads, as were tutorials for making bottle caps for Barack (see Figure 6.11). Many craftspeople obviously
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Figure 6.11. Bottle Caps for Barack, K. B. Vanhorn, 2008. Photograph Courtesy of Vanhorn.
did not worry too much about copyright issues, believing instead in the
importance of spreading hope for Obama;5 as K. B. Vanhorn (2008), a
self-proclaimed “manic thing-maker” and writer of A Patchwork World,
said, “I doubt Shepard Fairey will sue me for wanting to further his propaganda.” They even went so far as to document their work not only on
the Obama Craft Project Flickr page but also in an Obama Craft Project
blog spearhead by the blogging duo known as the Sewer-Sewist.
The Obama Street Art group was another collective whose selforganized efforts made the Obama Hope image more visible in digital
form. The Obama Street Art group emerged in February 2008 when
Dave Combs, editor of Peel Magazine, became fascinated by how much
public dialogue the Obama Progress posters and stickers were stimulating. Knowing a Flickr group would help the Obama posters and stickers reach a worldwide audience, he started the group with the hope
of expanding dialogue about Obama, whether fueled by positive or
negative opinions (pers. comm.). Soon, hundreds of people joined
this group and began uploading photographs documenting sightings
of the Obama Hope image in various manifestations—stickers, posters,
murals, t-shirts, and so forth. Not all members joined this collective for
the same reasons, however, or even out of interest in helping get Obama
elected. Street art tracker Lois Stavsky—a.k.a. LoisinWonderland—has
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Figure 6.12. What Happened to Hope? Lois Stavsky, 2009. Photograph Courtesy of
Stavsky.
documented numerous sightings of the Obama Hope poster in New
York City and Boston, some of which have been defaced and are peeling away (see Figure 6.12). Her documentation was stimulated simply by
of her fascination with the image’s hypervisibility (pers. comm.). While
perhaps not meeting Combs’s intended goal of intensifying the debate
about Obama, such efforts of Obama Street Art group members certainly intensified the circulation of the Obama Hope image in digital
form.
This group’s collective efforts also made visible just how widely the
Obama Hope image was circulating in physical forms. Philadelphia, New
York City, Boston, and Los Angeles were just few cities among hundreds
inundated with posters and stickers during the election. A Google Map
of Obama Hope image sightings presented in chapter 5 helps to visualize just how widely the Obama Works proliferated across the United
States and beyond within eighteen months of surfacing in Fairey’s
Progress design. (see Figure 5.6). By July 2008, for instance, stickers
could be found stuck to streetlight signs in Minneapolis, personal computers in Ohio, and car rear windows in Monterey. Large wheatpastes
could be found plastered in Washington DC, Austin, Birmingham, and
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Figure 6.13. Hope in Hanoi, Steve Jackson, 2009. Photograph Courtesy of Jackson.
San Francisco, while other renditions of Obama Hope would eventually
surface in locales as far away as Africa, Turkey, and Vietnam (see Figure
6.13). Whether enacted on an individual or collective basis, exactly who
distributed pictures of Obama Hope is uncertain. However, as a result
of this volunteer distribution in conjunction with the other initial distribution tactics instigated by Fairey and Sergant, the Obama Hope image
became more and more widely recognized in both urban and rural settings across the globe.
M E TAC U LT U R E
As early as January 31, 2008, just shortly after Obama Hope entered
into circulation, rhetorical consequences were becoming transparent as
people generated metaculture responding to Obama Hope in various
online and print sources. Such attention, especially in the blogosphere,
was not consistent in terms of content, as Obama Hope sparked a wide
spectrum of conversations and opinions. Surprisingly, perhaps, much
of the metaculture emerged in response to the aesthetic design of the
Progress and Hope posters, and it was not positive. On Boingboing, for
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example, David Pescovitz (2008) posted a copy of Fairey’s Progress poster
with the comment “Obama has a Posse Too,” alluding to Fairey’s Andre
the Giant Has a Posse sticker. Eighteen visitors tagged this post as a favorite, and within a short time, thirty-seven people had made comments,
indicating just how rhetorically provocative Obama Hope was becoming.
Some responses expressed puzzlement over the Progress and Hope posters’ designs in relation to peoples’ skepticism of Obama. For instance, a
visitor named Motisbeard (2008) wondered why Progress was included on
the poster, claiming “Why Progress . . .? Obama isn’t going to repeal the
Patriot Act, or close Guantanamo, or stop us from acting like swaggering cops all over the world. Someone please shake the artist awake and
point him to some sites where he can look at the voting records of candidates and see where they get their money.” Other visitors expressed
dismay about the “socialist” style of Fairey’s posters and its reminder
of Maoist propaganda. In particular, many worried the poster’s Soviet
Constructivist design style would do more harm than good in terms
of generating support for Obama. As Liberalart (2008) commented,
“I think the visual association with totalitarian leftist movements like
Mao’s and Stalin’s are problematic for the campaign’s message on one
nation and unity given the Right is already overly concerned about the
culture wars. This feeds that concern by associating his throngs of supporters with the Cultural Revolution, coming to your home soon to take
your bibles and re-educate you.” Fairey (2009b) explained that while
he did not believe in the “content” of posters crafted under Mao or by
early Soviet constructivists, he did think they were engaging aesthetically
and thus presumably rhetorically effective (273). Unconvinced, many,
as is evident in the comment above, feared the association between the
Obama Works and these propaganda posters would do too much damage to Obama in the long run.
Obama Hope also provoked much metacultural response about
Obama, especially as it surfaced in murals that began appearing on
walls from Tehran to Seattle to Santa Fe during the election season.
In each mural, Obama Hope transformed in some way and stimulated
its own metacultural response, but in at least two cases, Obama Hope
murals elicited commentary on Obama’s campaign tactics and presidential potential. In Seattle, for instance, as reported by Brad Wong
(2008), artist and muralist Shelly Farnham painted Obama Hope without accompanying text on her garage door in the Capital Hill district.
Farnham installed a video camera over the garage door, which captured a large number of local residents taking photos of the mural. The
Obama Hope mural also made local and national headlines. Evidently,
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the mural was initially painted as a ploy to ward off graffiti taggers
who had for some time been hitting Farnham’s garage door. Farnham
believed that painting a symbol of hope and inclusiveness on the door
would appeal to the taggers’ empathy and prevent what she perceived
to be destructive vandalism. As a general interest piece, this story
caught the media’s attention in October 2008 when Obama Hope first
appeared on Farnham’s door. The Obama Hope image on Farnham’s
garage door continued to circulate in digital forms in the media as
several local and national new sources reported the ongoing saga of
the Obama Hope mural’s fate. Apparently, the picture of Obama did
not have the appeal Farnham had wished for; a tagger spray-painted
“I only care about dead presidents” over the image the next month
(qtd. in Wong 2008). This story, in turn, stimulated a host of comments
from online bloggers, who over the next month debated, among other
issues, the “cult-like adulation” of Obama supporters and the future
efficacy of Obama’s presidency. Also, while some readers thought this
tag was referring to a popular funk rock band, others assumed the tagger was making a threat to Obama. Such threats were not rare during
the election season; after all, as reported that same month by Reuters,
Obama’s life had been threatened by “two white supremacist skinheads
in Tennessee” who had plans to go on a killing spree and then target
Obama (Charles 2008).
In Santa Fe, New Mexico, debates also emerged on blogs in response
to a photograph of another Obama Hope mural (see Figure 6.14).
This time, street artists Ratha Sok and Bimmer Torre from Koolhats
Productions painted the Obama Hope image in Fairey’s color palette
onto a wall alongside the following Obama quote: “I’m asking you to
believe not in my ability to bring about real change in Washington. I am
asking you to believe in yours.” While we do not have access to people’s
reactions to this mural on the streets of Santa Fe, we do have access to
comments posted in response to a photograph of the mural uploaded
by Seetwist on Flickr in March of 2008. In the heated debate that
unfolded, some praised Obama for his promise to evoke change, while
others vehemently argued that the US American public had been duped
into thinking Obama was different from all the other politicians who
had been in office. Accusations of Obama’s relations to the New World
Order also surface with aggressive tones—accusations that echoed in
several remixes of Obama Hope and that still echo in posts on numerous blogs circulating today (Adolff 2008).
While the style and design of posters of Obama received much
metacultural attention, Obama Hope also triggered considerable
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Figure 6.14. Barack Obeyma–2 Kool Productions, 2008. Photograph Courtesy of Adolff.
commentary about Fairey himself. Indeed, some praised his ability to
mass distribute nicely illustrated graphics. Yet, many called him out on
his past “plagiarist” actions and decried his Obama posters as more evidence of this street artist’s lack of creativity. Some critics, echoing sentiments disclosed above, also charged Fairey with creating propaganda,
or what one critic called “Obamaganda.” In his vehement March 12,
2008, post on American Digest: Dispatches from the New America, for example, a writer calling himself Vanderleun (2008) echoed Mark Vallen’s
(2007) now infamous rant against Fairey and charged Fairey with being
a “one-trick pony” in that “there’s one message and one method. It’s art
made by photoshop philosophy.” Vanderleun also claimed that Fairey
had managed to become nothing but a “Chief-Propagandist-in-Waiting
among the Obamaites.” “[F]or a mere $70,” Vanderleun noted, “you too
can have an Obamicon for your wall, your office, or wherever the worship of Obama wants to happen.” In the next five days, over thirty-six
people would enter into a dialogue commenting on Fairey’s lack of creative talent and the poor design of his Obama Works.
Yet while such heated conversations were erupting early on in Obama
Hope’s political career and would later indeed come to haunt Obama
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Hope and Fairey (as discussed in the next chapter), on the whole,
Obama Hope’s reputation was wildly positive. Many people, in fact,
seemed completely rhetorically taken with Obama Hope. Consider
the enthusiastic reactions of one visitor to Creativity-Online named
Veiledsongbird (2008) as a quintessential example:
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I was driving down Georgia Avenue when I saw it. The sign was red, white
and blew me away! The person holding it knew exactly what he had and
that it stood for a lot more than mere endorsement. All the other people
on the street corner idly stood with their Hillary and Ron Paul signs. But
the man with the Obama sign held it high and eagerly. I couldn’t help but
grin and wave with enthusiasm! The poster and the person captured me in
that moment. Of course, here I am able to linger longer and truly appreciate the poster. I love the waves of blue coming in from the left and washing
over Obama’s face. The red solid masses in the shadows on the right are
struggles we currently face. Those struggles need to be brought to light,
but cannot be dealt with in one fell swoop and will need waves of painstaking persistence in order to be resolved. Left and right can have their
symbolism here, as well. I also like that he is leaning forward. This adds
tremendous weight and depth to the poster. He leans into (blue waves)
his strong conviction and values, which push him and give him strength to
look toward the (red solid masses) present and future struggles our nation
has with confidence. Awesome poster! Things are definitely looking up.
Because many shared such sentiments about Obama Hope and recognized its ability to generate national appeal, Obama Hope began earning the reputation as the 2008 election’s hottest campaign poster. In surmising why the Hope poster was gaining such mass attention, historian
Steven Heller (2008a) argued that the Hope poster was not particularly
unique in its message, content, tone, or appeal when considered in a
long line of historical political campaign posters. As evidence, he cited,
among others, a poster for Eugene McCarthy by Ben Shan and an Andy
Warhol design promoting Richard Nixon. In such posters, similar patriotic tones, portraits of candidates, and interactions between image and
word send a short, powerful message. Yet, Heller argued, what the Hope
poster had in common with all these historical posters, and what made
all of them successful, was a message unique to the times and a fresh
design with a youthful appeal.
While obviously not everyone agreed with its uniqueness, as evident
in comments above, Obama’s official campaign team was certainly convinced that Obama Hope was rhetorically in sync with the times and
could indeed make powerful appeals to youth. This conviction was
important as Obama’s official campaign would prove to be one of the
most important collectives in accelerating the Obama Hope image’s
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distribution, circulation, and transformation. Yet before I move on to
discuss that role, it’s important to note here that no matter whether
the metacultural response to Obama Hope was negative or positive, it
played an important role in Obama Hope’s circulation and transformation. As subsequent chapters disclose, as Obama Hope became widely
discussed in and across various media and genres, a multiplicity of unexpected rhetorical consequences erupted as various individuals became
interested in Obama Hope for different reasons. While some became
invested in finding its origin, others desired to reproduce and remix it
for divergent purposes—educational, political—and still others began
to engage with it for legal reasons. In this rhetorical sense, Obama
Hope, as we will see, began to take on epideictic, forensic, and deliberative functions as it commemorated, defended particular actions, and
worked toward political and educational change. Such diversity in rhetorical function would not have emerged had its circulation and visibility
not been intensified by the layers of metaculture that began emerging in
response to it and circulating faster than the image itself.
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T H E O B A M A C A M PA I G N
As will be described in more detail in chapter 7, much controversy
exists about the exact nature of the relationship among Obama’s official campaign, Fairey, and Obama Hope. On February 22, 2008, Obama
wrote a personal letter to Fairey thanking him for his work in support
of Obama’s election. Obama wrote that not only had Fairey’s work
“encouraged Americans to believe so they help change the status-quo,”
but it had also had “a profound effect on people, whether seen in a gallery or on a stop sign” (Fairey 2009a). According to Fairey, shortly thereafter, the Obama campaign officially asked him to create another poster
to be sold on the Mybarackobama, or MyBO, website. But Fairey and
Sergant both claimed that up until that point they were only loosely affiliated with the official Obama campaign. Many others suspected that the
alliance between the Obama campaign and the Fairey-Sergant team was
more calculated than Fairey and Sergant would have us believe. Fairey
stated that the official Obama campaign “let” him produce the Progress
poster “under the radar” (qtd. in Beer 2008). In a self-written blog post
published in the Huffington Post, Fairey (2012) also stated that he “was
politely asked” to change the word progress to hope in his initial poster
design. Such claims have led many to think that the official campaign
sought out Fairey (and others) for propagandistic purposes. While
such intentions may never become fully known, the Obama campaign
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Obama Hope, Presidential Iconography, and the 2008 Election
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did eventually hire Fairey to produce three official posters for the campaign, and the MyBO website became a major means of distributing the
Obama Hope image.
The Obama campaign’s ability to widely distribute these posters can
be attributed to the “fully networked campaign warfare” (Talbot 2008)
launched by the Obama team, which provided wide access to the posters
and increased their visibility. As is well known by now, much of Obama’s
victory has been attributed to his campaign’s success in finding ways to
create a buzz about Obama via social networking. As Karen Tumulty
(2007) from Time magazine reported, “No campaign has been more
aggressive in tapping into social networks and leveraging the financial
power of hundreds of thousands of small donors.” The Obama team
was able to generate this buzz by using MyBO, which acted as a central networking platform, in conjunction with the use of Twitter, email,
SMS (text messaging), and other phone tools. Such social networking
devices enabled masses of people to easily volunteer, donate funds, and
be contacted—all of which were necessary to deliver a strong campaign
message and generate a strong network of supporters. Thanks to social
media experts such as Facebook’s Chris Hughes, MyBO was especially
crucial in generating such support as it enabled, as Ellen McGirt (2008)
pointed it, “Obamaniacs” to do all sorts of things that kept people working hard for Obama—link up their own blogs to discuss platform issues,
submit policy recommendations directly to the campaign, set up, organize, and advertise mini fund-raising sites and other events, and even
telecanvass from home. Visitors could also, of course, participate in
online fund-raising events directly organized by the campaign itself.
One of the ways funds were raised on the MyBO website was to sell
artwork, which came to be known as the Artists for Obama series. This
series, produced by nine artists, entailed a run of ten limited edition
prints available for sale on the Barack Obama online store. All sales were
considered 100 percent contributions to the campaign and counted
toward an individual’s $2,300 contribution limit. In addition to the last
poster of the series, Fairey donated the first poster in the series, which
came to be called the Obama Change poster. While some of the art, such
as the work produced by Scott Hansen, Antar Dayal, Jonathan Hoefler,
Rafael Lopez, Lance Wyman, and Gui Borchert, sold for $60 to $70,
other work produced by Lou Stoval and Robert Indiana sold for $1,000
or more. Within a short time, every piece of art sold out. This series6
would thus prove to be quite lucrative for the Obama campaign, as it
raised millions of dollars to help Obama get elected. By far though, the
Change poster was the leading fundraiser for the series.
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Figure 6.15. Obama Change, Designed
by Shepard Fairey for the 2008
Organizing for America Campaign.
The Change poster marks a significant design transformation in
Fairey’s Obama Works. A different source picture provided by the official Obama campaign was used, but the style, color palette, and layout
of Obama Hope bled into its interface (see Figure 6.15). The word
change, which obviously replaced the word hope, also appeared in much
smaller in print. In addition, Obama’s logo no longer appeared as a
lapel pin on Obama’s left shoulder, appearing instead over Obama’s
neck on the left-hand side of the poster. Midday on March 12, 2008,
the Barack Obama campaign sent out a tweet announcing that Artists
for Obama items were going on sale. This tweet emphasized that a
limited edition of Shepard Fairey’s print would be sold on the Barack
Obama online store, to which it provided a direct link.7 The Change
poster, five thousand of which were made available for seventy dollars
each, sold out quickly, just as Fairey’s posters did on his own website.
Also, like Fairey’s other posters, the Change poster sold for three times
its value, at the very least, on eBay within a month. According to Fairey,
this single poster raised between $300,000 and $400,000 for Obama’s
campaign (Sullivan 2008b).
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Obama Hope, Presidential Iconography, and the 2008 Election
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The Change poster, in addition to the Progress and Hope posters, added
to the metaculture of the Obama Hope image and solidified its importance in the Obama Campaign. Scott Goodstein, an external web strategist now considered the “digital guru” of the Obama campaign, had
recognized the potential value of Obama Hope early on. Goodstein is
credited with using his expertise in social networking to attract close
to 2 million Obama supporters on Myspace, 6.5 million on Facebook,
and over 1.5 million on Twitter (Talbot 2008). He also created Obama
Mobile—the mobile communication strategy that used text messaging,
downloads, interactive voice communication, and iPhone applications,
among other technologies, to generate interconnected grassroots support. Goodstein understood that the Obama campaign needed to generate a wide community of activists who could generate support among
US citizens. According to Goodstein, his first impression when he saw
Obama Hope in one of its earliest poster manifestations was that the
“image was what all of us were feeling around the campaign and why
guys like me joined the campaign in early February when Obama was
down by 20 points” (Edgers 2009). Goodstein says that Fairey’s visual
contributions, along with will.i.am’s Yes We Can viral video, “were more
valuable than the donation of money alone. What they gave us . . . was
way more valuable. They gave us something that they as artists and musicians were able to craft—take our brand message and bring their artistic interpretation to it” (“How Obama Used Social Networking Tools To
Win” 2009). With such affirmation of the value of Fairey’ work, it is little
wonder the official Obama campaign would later become a leading contributor in circulating various renditions of Obama Hope. In its role as
a fundraising and branding machine, Obama Hope proved to play a significant role in creating the buzz Obama needed for victory. In this role,
the image was also catapulted deeper into circulation.
R H E TO R I C A L D E S I G N
As is made clear in this case study thus far, the viral speed at which Obama
Hope circulated was enabled by Fairey’s and Sergant’s intentional distribution tactics; emergent networks that assembled and self-organized;
the metaculture surrounding the Obama Works; and the official Obama
campaign. The rhetorical design of Obama Hope must also be credited
with intensifying its circulation. In particular, the repetition of is visual
elements helped brand Obama; thus, Fairey was asked to produce more
art for the official Obama campaign, which only boosted Obama Hope’s
reputation. Also, the simplicity of the design made the image highly
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transferable to other mediums. Ease of transferability enabled the image
to be mass reproduced in multiple genres, appropriated for political
purposes, and emplaced in various settings across the Internet and in
physical locations across the United States. Such mass reproduction,
in turn, made the image hypervisible and widely recognized. To fully
understand how this image reached iconic status and functioned as an
important visual rhetoric during the election, then, both the consistency
and transferability of the design must be attended to.
A comparison of Fairey’s Obama Vote poster with other Fairey works
illustrates just how integral rhetorical design was to helping Obama
Hope reach iconic status. For the final work in the Artists for Obama
series, Fairey was asked to produce a poster for the final campaign push.
This Obama Vote poster would also be the last of the Obama Works
designed specifically to garner political support for Obama during the
campaign season of 2008. Like the Change poster, the Vote poster did not
employ Garcia’s news photo as a reference.8 Instead, the Vote poster contains an image of Barack Obama taken by David Turnley, from whom
Fairey obtained a proper license to use in his design (see Figure 6.16).
In the Vote poster, Obama is smiling and Vote is positioned below his portrait in lieu of Progress or Hope. While earlier posters in the Obama Works
depict a serious, confident, capable leader in order to achieve the goal
of gaining support for Obama, the Vote poster depicts a more friendly,
cheerful face. Also, in the middle of the O sits Obama’s campaign logo,
which in previous posters had been situated on a pin on his suit lapel or
overlaid on Obama’s neck.
The purpose of and message in the Vote poster is more direct than in
previous ones. The Progress and Hope posters began, as Fairey claimed
in an NPR interview with Terry Gross, with an initial concept—to divide
Obama’s face into tones of both red and blue signifying the divided
Republican and Democratic parties and the need for unity. To actualize
that concept, he needed, as described previously, to find an image that
depicted a gaze of leadership and wisdom. He also needed an image
with lighting that would allow him to play with shadows and tones to create the red, light beige, and blue values. The angle of Obama’s gaze in
Garcia’s photos, Fairy explained, was popular among other historic photos of politicians and political figures, such as John F. Kennedy and Che
Guevera. It is a gaze that looks off into the horizon as if confident the
subject knows what lies in the future (Gross 2009). Thus, in the Progress
and Hope images, as Fairey explained in an article in the Washington
Post, the rhetorical purpose of the poster was to depict a leader gazing
off into the future saying “I can guide you” (Booth 2009). In the Vote
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Figure 6.16. Obama Vote,
Designed by Shepard Fairey
for the 2008 Organizing for
America campaign.
poster, the purpose narrowed to help the official Obama campaign trigger actual votes for Obama in the US presidential election to would be
held on November 4, 2008. Thus, whereas earlier messages conveyed
abstract campaign themes of hope, change, and progress, the message
of this poster, then, became a direct call to action—vote, and don’t just
vote, but vote for Obama. As such, the design was reprinted on many
other posters with telephone numbers and websites informing voters as
to where they could actually go to cast their vote.
Yet, despite the different messages communicated through play of
image and word, the Vote poster, like the Progress, Hope, and Change posters, contained the same visual elements that had become Obama Hope’s
defining characteristics: a refined and simple design, a patriotic color
palette, a stylized portrait of Obama, and a hierarchal arrangement
between word and image. These signature design elements of Obama
Hope created consistency not only across the Obama Works but also
across the designs of the official Obama campaign. This consistency
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would prove to be very useful for cementing Obama’s brand. As
Scott Thomas (2010), designer of the Organizing for Obama website
explained, the Obama campaign attempted to create consistent design
themes constituted by four elements:
•
•
•
•
simple and concise messaging,
messages of hope and change,
emphasis on the significant historical moment of this election, and
consistency and balance in design elements.
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This design consistency could certainly be seen across the official campaign literature being used to communicate certain messages and generate national appeals, such as the logo, signs, website, and so forth.
But this consistency in design also translated to promotional products
sold by the campaign such as umbrellas, stickers, jewelry, pins, water
bottles, and clothing. Even as one of the brilliant moves made by the
campaign was to let people remix the Obama brand to create their own
campaign materials, the consistency across all things associated with
the campaign helped brand Obama and earn him the title of “the bestdesigned identity of a U.S. presidential candidate” (Bhargava 2008). Yet
while Obama’s official campaign materials and social networking strategies certainly helped build a consistent identity for Obama, in terms of
branding, none went so far as Obama Hope; the consistency of its design
elements across the Obama Works helped generate a brand of hope and
change that US citizens could buy into. Ironically, such branding only
helped the Obama Hope image proliferate, as many went so far as to
even brand the Obama Hope image onto their own bodies during the
campaign season.
REPURPOSING
Because of its ability to raise funds, generate support for, and brand
Obama, the Hope poster, of all the Obama works, was and still is considered the most rhetorically effective design produced during the election. By October of 2008, for instance, Fairey’s Hope poster was being
called “this election’s poster child” in the New York Times (Heller 2008b)
and “an important symbol in the political landscape of 2008” in the
Huffington Post (Arnon 2008). Part of this fame was certainly established
by the consistency of design in terms of color palette, graphic style, and
layout across the Obama Works, along with other factors discussed thus
far in this chapter. However, the ease of transferability of the Obama
Hope image itself should also be noted. Because the design of Obama
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Hope was so simple and its digital production made it so mutable and
accessible, it could be easily incorporated in other pictures. It could
also be reproduced in multiple mediums such as posters, t-shirts, stickers, and other goods—a possibility that was taken advantage of by the
Obama campaign to generate funding and by others who, as we have
seen, took their own initiative to reproduce the image in posters of
their own. In chapter 8, it will become even clearer how the Obama
Hope image transformed in unexpected ways across genres, forms,
and mediums, which diversified its use, increased its circulation, and
enhanced its recognizability. Yet, during the election season, Fairey
and Sergant also repurposed the Obama Hope image to generate even
more support for Obama. This repurposing of the design solidified
Obama Hope’s reputation as a political actor in and of itself, as is evident in the fact that it came to both commemorate and embody the
entire Obama campaign.
Obama Hope’s repurposing took place both before and after Obama
was elected. The Obama Hope image, for instance, played a major role
in generating interest for the Manifest Hope project that emerged on
the campaign scene during the Democratic National Convention in
Denver. Obey Giant, MoveOn.org, and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) presented the Manifest Hope project. The
Manifest Hope project offered an exhibit during the DNC showcasing
some of the most influential and widely recognized art associated with
the presidential campaign. To attract submissions, the event was billed
to grass-roots and street artists in an online art contest for which artists
were asked to submit art related to the major themes and grassroots
energy driving the Obama campaign: hope, change, progress, unity,
and patriotism. The top five winners of this contest had their art on display with other established, invited artists at Denver’s Andenken Gallery
between August 24 and 28, as well as on the Manifest Hope online gallery. Thirty-one other finalists’ works were selected to be auctioned off
on eBay, the proceeds of which were donated to progressive efforts
aimed at helping Obama win the election. In those five days, over fifteen
thousand people visited the gallery, and on the final night, a free public outdoor concert hosted by Denver mayor Gavin Newsom and comic
Sarah Silverman attracted over eight thousand people.
The Obama Hope image was certainly on display at the Denver gallery among other contemporary work, as Fairey created a spray-painted
stencil and collage of Obama Hope on paper (see Figure 6.17). In addition, the Obama Hope image helped advertise this event on the Internet
and on posters, fliers, and wheatpastes distributed around Denver. Many
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Figure 6.17. Shepard Fairey’s Manifest Hope, Denver, CO, 2008. Photograph Courtesy of
Yosi Sergant.
images could have been chosen to play this role; Ron English’s Abraham
Obama had certainly gained enough national recognition. Yet Obama
Hope was chosen not only because Fairey was part of the event’s organization but also because Fairey’s work was often credited with inspiring
other artists to generate their own art for the campaign. In addition,
because of its hypervisibility during the election and its significant role
in shaping political participation, toward the end of the election campaign, Obama Hope had become regarded as the most iconic image
associated with Obama’s campaign (Arnon 2008). Indicative of this status, Obama Hope was repurposed once again, this time to commemorate not only Obama’s victory, but also the 2009 inauguration and the
entire 2008 election campaign.
To commemorate Obama’s presidential win, Obama Hope became
part of the Yes We Did design for MoveOn.org (see Figure 6.18). MoveOn
is a nonprofit organization that began in 1998 when Wes Boyd and Joan
Blades came up with the idea to use technology to motivate people to
participate in US politics. Since its inception, more than four million
people have joined MoveOn, making it a powerful force in US politics
today. In the 2008 election, MoveOn contributed close to one million
volunteers to the Obama campaign who collectively worked over twenty
million hours and helped generate over $80 million dollars to move
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Figure 6.18. Yes We Did,
Designed by Shepard
Fairey for MoveOn.
org, 2008. Courtesy
of Shepard FaireyObeyGiant.com and
MoveOn.org.
Obama toward victory (MoveOn 2010, 2–3). These efforts included
online and offline organizing to register and recruit voters; producing some of the campaign’s most memorable advertisements; mobilizing local councils to educate voters about Obama and McCain; and, as
already noted, helping promote and put on the Manifest Hope project.
As MoveOn executive director Eli Pariser remarked on election night,
Obama’s victory could not have happened without the incredible support of MoveOn members’ collective action. Speaking to MoveOn members, he pointed out that Obama won because “in communities across
the country, you stood up. We stood up. We found each other. We built
a movement, and our voices got stronger. We talked to our neighbors,
we enlisted our friends. And things began to change” (MoveOn 2010,
16). In an effort to thank members for their hard work, MoveOn hired
Fairey to design the Yes We Did image and distributed over 3.25 million
free Yes We Did stickers to their members.
In this design, the same color palette found in all of Fairey’s political posters is used; however, Obama Hope interacts with several other
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images in the design to commemorate Obama’s victory. The Obama
Hope image is centered with the words “United We Progress Toward
a More Perfect Union” encircling the central image. The words “Yes
We Did” fill a banner that runs across the top of the image while the
date Obama was elected, November 4, 2008, spreads across the bottom. Surrounding Obama Hope is a photograph refashioned by Fairey
depicting Obama with hand raised in victory facing a cheering crowd.
Written in small text below this image are the words “Together We Made
History” while the words “People” and “Powered” sit on either sides of
the bottom half of the image. In describing the purpose of this design,
MoveOn.org told its members, “We wanted to say thank you to all of
you who worked so hard in this historic campaign, so we joined with
Shepard Fairey . . . to create a special piece of art commemorating this
historic, people-powered victory” (Art of Obama, qtd. in “Free Victory
Stickers by Shepard Fairey” 2008). In addition to receiving a free sticker,
members could purchase additional stickers and limited edition posters,
all of which were made available the day after Obama’s victory in early
November. The proceeds from the sales of Yes We Did prints would be
used to launch a campaign to raise funds to pass Obama’s progressive
agenda once he entered office (MoveOn.org 2008).
During the inauguration, the Obama Hope image was again repurposed to take on yet another commemorative role as it surfaced in
another design celebrating Obama’s victory, which was created by Fairey
for the Obama-Biden Presidential Inauguration Committee. This design
is constructed in the same palette of colors, fonts, and theme as Fairey’s
other posters (see Figure 6.19). Yet, the words “Be the Change” hover
horizontally over the Obama Hope image, which itself sits in the center of the poster between the images of the Capitol building and the
White House in Washington, DC. The official inauguration seal sits
beneath the Obama Hope image. Separating this part of the poster
from the lower left- and right-hand corners of the poster is a red-andwhite-striped ribbon. Beneath the striped ribbon, in the corners toward
the bottom, the same image of the crowd found in the Yes We Did poster
sits, with the inauguration date “January 20th, 2009” written below.
Ten thousand copies of this poster were released by the Barack Obama
Inaugural Committee to mark Obama’s historical election. To no one’s
surprise, this poster design became a symbol of the inauguration itself.
The design was reproduced on posters, lapel pins, t-shirts, and stickers
and sold on the Inaugural Committee’s online store. In addition, before
sworn-in President Obama entered the stage at the Youth Inaugural Ball
on the night of the inauguration, the inauguration poster hung over the
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Figure 6.19. Be the Change,
Designed by Shepard Fairey
for the 2008 Obama-Biden
Inaugural Committee, 2009.
stage as a symbol of a monumental milestone: the election of the first
African American president in US history.
Due its wide circulation, high visibility, and ability to raise funds and
motivate political participation, as well as its official recognition and
use by the Obama campaign, Obama Hope came to commemorate
more than Obama’s victory and the inauguration. During inauguration weekend, one of Fairey’s three mixed-stencil collages of Obama
Hope was hung in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC
(see Figure 6.20).9 In the past, official presidential portraits have been
displayed in the National Portrait Gallery as presidents are leaving
office. The Obama Hope stencil thus made history by becoming the
first portrait to be hung in the gallery before inauguration weekend
even ended. As justification for the acquisition of this collage, National
Portrait Gallery director Martin Sullivan claimed that “Shepard Fairey’s
instantly recognizable image was integral to the Obama campaign”; it
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Figure 6.20. Obama Portrait, Photograph by Jacquelyn Martin, 2009. Permissions from
Associated Press.
was “an emblem of a significant election, as well as a new presidency”
(“NPG Acquires Shepard Fairey’s Portrait of Barack Obama” 2009).
This official recognition sparked acceleration of the circulation of
Obama Hope as newspapers around the world began to report the
news. It also sparked more metaculture as people began to debate
whether Obama Hope and Fairey were worthy of such a place in
political history. Nonetheless, upon entering the US National Portrait
Gallery, the Obama Hope image secured its status as the national symbol of the 2008 election campaign.
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CON C LU S I ON
As this part of the Obama Hope case study has attempted to illustrate,
whether people liked or disliked the Obama Hope image, during the
2008 presidential election campaign, the image became not just a cultural icon and brand but also a powerful rhetorical actor. This widespread recognition and political efficacy was made possible by the guerilla-distribution tactics initially enacted by Fairey and Sergant, which
helped spread the image across a wide range of locations, forms, and
genres. Fairey and Sergant were particularly strategic in making the
Obama Works widely accessible in both print and digital forms, creating
a network of volunteers to distribute the image in a variety of mediums,
and harnessing the Obama Works’ potential to raise funds and get out
the vote for Obama. Such tactics instigated by Fairey and Sergant can,
thus, certainly be credited for helping the Obama Hope image become
the most recognized image of the 2008 presidential election.
The intentional tactics used by Fairey and Sergant, however, cannot be given full credit for the Obama Hope image’s iconic status. As
is evident in this chapter, many individuals took it upon themselves
to reproduce Obama Hope and hang various, and often homemade,
versions in private and public settings. Via such emplacement, Obama
Hope transformed private homes and urban spaces into political
spaces and became even more visible. Emergent collectives of people
and technologies, whose intra-actions within certain collectives contributed to the image’s mass distribution and reproduction, were also
integral to the Obama Hope image’s circulation and consequentiality.
The official Obama campaign was one of the most important collectives that emerged during 2008. With the strategic implementation led
by Goodstein and others, the MyBO website and other social networking sites especially became key actants in accelerating the image’s circulation. Besides affording the opportunity for networks of volunteers
to self-organize in geographical locations and in cyberspace to work
for Obama, the MyBO website and Twitter teamed up to help orchestrate and maintain sales of the Obama Art series, which boosted the
reputation of Obama Hope’s design as a fundraising and branding
machine as well as a political force.
Yet, as will become even clearer in art 2 of this case study, social
networking sites such as Flickr enabled other networks to assemble
and organize on their own accord. In some cases, as with the Obama
Craft Project, certain members contributed to the collective effort to
increase the visibility of Obama Hope for campaign-related reasons.
In other cases, however, as with the Obama Street Art group, certain
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members contributed to the collective effort to increase the visibility
of Obama Hope for reasons having nothing to do with helping bring
Obama to victory. Instead, some citizens armed with cameras simply
became fascinated with the Obama Hope image itself and wanted to
help document in what locations the image was appearing and what
kinds of transformations were emerging. Such participation illustrates
how distributed networks of actants, which organized from both the
top and the bottom, made possible the high visibility and intense consequentiality of Obama Hope.
In addition, we can clearly see how metaculture related to the Obama
Hope image emerged in often surprising ways across a broad range of
media sites from the New York Times to Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and
blogs. Much of the metaculture that accelerated the image’s circulation
and transformation was predictably filled with praise. The rhetorical
design of the Hope poster alone sparked much inspiration and awe from
reporters, other artists, and everyday citizens alike. Many even thought
it had earned a place, alongside Norman Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter
and John Fitzpatrick’s Che Guevera posters, on the top-ten list of political posters that changed US history. Such praise increased the desire
to own the image, document its locations and transformations, discuss
its rhetorical design, and learn more about it. Yet, as will also become
more evident in chapter 9, Obama Hope and its emergent praise also
sparked unconscious feelings of relation and unconscious desires to get
on the rhetorical bandwagon and create Obama-related work for political change—a contagious desire that catalyzed not only mass reproduction of Obama Hope but also the production of other imitative designs
and distribution tactics.
As Fairey claims, viral circulation is dependent on how much an
image is desired and admired; therefore, such metaculture, as Fairey initially hoped, helped intensify the circulation of Obama Hope. Yet much
metaculture was actually filled with criticism expressing disapproval of
the Obama Works’ designs, Obama, and Fairey himself as well as with
skepticism about the Obama Hope image’s rhetorical potential. While
most likely not wished for or appreciated by Fairey, this “negative” attention only contributed to the recognizability of Obama Hope. As chapter
7 makes especially clear, as more and more people shared their criticism
via the Internet, particularly about issues related to “originality” and
“creativity,” Obama Hope’s circulation in abstract, digital, and physical
forms only intensified. Thus, as much as Obama Hope’s viral circulation
was dependent on people’s admiration of its rhetorical potential to help
Obama win the election, it was also dependent on a multitude of critical
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175
consequences that unexpectedly emerged on the metacultural scene
during its circulation.
Obama Hope’s circulation, transformation, and consequentiality
were also made possible by its rhetorical design, the consistent style
and content of which could be easily transferred across genres and
media. In the Obama Works alone, we saw how in some cases the portrait of Obama would change yet the colors, tones, relation between
image and word, and overall organization remained stable. In other
instances, we saw how little changed except the word beneath Obama’s
portrait. While the consistency of style made the Obama Hope image
more recognizable, the ease of content transferability also enabled
the image to deliver various messages. With the help of the Obama
Works, hope and change came to be the buzzwords associated with the
Obama campaign. Through repetition of style and Obama’s portrait,
the Obama Works also helped brand Obama’s image, which as Fairey
himself explained, “promised utopia almost” (qtd. in Shapiro 2010).
Because of such rhetorical potentials, in addition to the simplicity of
design, which made it easy to replicate across a broad range of media
by professionals and amateurs, Obama Hope came to be greatly valued
as an actor for political change. As more and more people became
interested in securing Obama’s place in the oval office, they turned
to Obama Hope to express their national identity, show support,
and motivate political participation. Because of its ability to motivate
action, Obama Hope would come to symbolize Obama’s entire presidential election.
Such reliance on the image to do political work during the 2008
presidential election makes it fair to claim that the Hope image
achieved its intended effects. Via its intra-actions with a wide spectrum
of things—people, canvases, trees, signposts, websites, blogs, and so
forth—it gained wide recognition, helped motivate political action in
support of Obama, and helped persuade a wide audience that Obama
had the wisdom to guide the United States toward progress and a more
hopeful future. Such political reliance also certainly helps to explain
why and how the viral circulation of Obama Hope occurred. Yet, as we
have already witnessed to a small degree, unintended consequences
emerge that accelerate the speed at which an image travels and intensify its rhetorical transformation. Such unintended consequentiality
has enabled Obama Hope to not only become a cultural icon and cultural phenomenon, as Ben Arnon (2008) has argued, but also a rhetorical phenomenon that is still unfolding even today. In addition to what
has already been made visible about the Obama Wor…