A few days ago, we wrote about the Obama Inauguration poster, as well as artist Shepard Fairey, who also created the PROGRESS, HOPE and CHANGE graphic illustrations, all of which featured a posterized portrait of the President Elect (for more on the series, see the Washington Post feature that outlines the creative steps behind Fairey’s Barack Obama poster).
While Fairey admits to using a photograph of Barack Obama – hauled off Google image search – as the starting point for the artwork, the original photographer has always remained a mystery. Over at Philadelphia Inquirer photographer Tom Gralish’s blog, Scene on the Road, he’s been wondering aloud who took the photograph, if they were aware, and if not, what they though of their work being used in this manner. Well, you can file this mystery under ’solved’.
Computer programmer Mike Cramer managed to track down the original photographer using, once again, Google image search. Took a little bit of futzing around (see above) but he managed to track the original photograph back to Jim Young, a photographer for Reuters. Young took the picture of Obama in Washington in January of 2007, during confirmation hearings and was, believe it or not, blissfully unaware that his photo was the ‘inspiration’ for the illustrations. Young even took photographs of the poster while on the campaign trail with the Obama team, without recognizing the similarities.
Upon being told the Obama campaign posters were based on his photograph, Young was thrilled, said he was honored, but also admitted to being glad that the news didn’t break till after the campaign. Read more about how the mystery Obama photograper was ID’d at Gralish’s blog.
Kind of interesting story on how everything panned out.
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