"The political messages involved in your work have encouraged Americans to believe that they can help change the status-quo. Your images have a profound effect on people, whether seen in a gallery or on a stop sign." The preceding quote is an excerpt of a letter addressed to Shepard Fairey from the man depicted in his iconic Obama Hope poster, President Barack Obama, who was still a senator at the time. In the letter, he is commenting on the ability of Fairey's art to affect people, regardless of its presentational form. The presentational form of an image is one of the three aspects of a visual object's materiality identified by Edwards (2002). In turn, materiality is only one of "three key characteristics" of Gillian Rose's "anthropological approach to interpreting visual materials," the two others being materialization and mobility (Rose 219). It is through this anthropological approach that Fairey's Obama Hope poster will be interpreted in an attempt to emphasize the image's social life and to examine the process whereby the image has become, as art critic Carlo McCormick put it in his article, "Hopeful Disobedience," "Emblazoned in our collective mind's eye as a defining icon of optimism and change" (McCormick 51).

The materiality of an image is the characteristic of the anthropological approach that treats an image as,"...a three-dimensional thing, not only a two-dimensional image" (Rose 219). Here, Edwards and Hart (2004:1) are speaking specifically of photographs, but the concept can also be applied to Fairey's Obama Hope poster as well as many other images. They continue with, "As such, photographs exist materially in the world...as subject to additions to their surface or as drawing their meanings from presentational forms such as frames and albums. Photographs are both images and physical objects that exist in time and space" (Rose 219). Located inside a visual object's materiality, there are three different aspects that make it up: the aforementioned presentational form, as well as visual form and material form. According to Rose, visual form "...refers to what the image shows" (Rose 227). In the case of Fairey's Obama Hope poster, its visual form shows a portrait of our current president, rendered in the colors of our country's flag, above the word "HOPE," shown in all capital letters and rendered in blue (Image 1). The material form of the object, or, "...the physical qualities of the visual object itself," is dependent upon which presentational form the image is in when presented to a viewer (Rose 227). Herein lies the intricacy of speaking about the Fairey's work in relation to its materiality: the Obama Hope poster has been articulated in so many different presentational forms that it would be impossible to represent all of them in an interpretation with parameters such as this one (though several of them will be addressed).

Image 2 - Source: Walrus Magazine

Image 3 - Source: Sarah Bowen

But, all of the different presentational forms do share something in common with each other and with what Geoffrey Batchen, in his "Vernacular Photographies," calls a, "...photograph's morphological possibilities" (Batchen 59). Batchen explains the concept of morphology thusly, "Indeed, the invisibility of the photograph, its transparency to its referent, has long been one of its most cherished features" (Batchen 59). There are multiple levels involved in the morphological process in regards to Obama Hope poster. There exists an original Obama Hope poster on which all the different presentational forms are based, but it seems not too far of a stretch to say that the majority of people with knowledge of the image have also never seen its original incarnation. This is where Fairey's tactics as a street artist factors into the equation. "The artist's intention that the image be widely reproduced and 'go viral' on the Internet exceeded his greatest expectations" (face to face). Thus, the first image of Obama Hope poster that the majority of people viewed was itself in a different presentational form (Images 2 & 3) than that of the original referent, establishing a "transparency to its referent" through its intentional likeness to the image represented in the original version of the poster. Even the version of the poster (Image 1) hanging in the National Portrait Gallery is a reproduction of the original (Kennedy). The chief curator of the gallery, Carolyn Carr, said that their poster was "a beautiful work of art," but that, "one of the reasons the gallery acquired it is that the image - as opposed to the object - is ubiquitous and it became the image of the campaign" (Kennedy). The saturation of this image in the collective mindset is at such a level that the image establishes the connection between whatever presentational forms it is being represented in and the presentational form of the original version. On top of the different presentational forms of the reproductions, there are many more presentational forms that are created in the original version's image, but which vary wildly when it comes to material form. While the original version was handcrafted, the reproductions were just prints. The material forms of this next level of "morphological possibilities," range from the exterior of Playstation 3 (Image 4) to the ink of a tattoo (Image 5) to the carved skin of a pumpkin (Image 6), yet they all maintain their transparency to the referent, in the same manner as the reproduced prints, because of their likeness to the image, its visual form, in the original version of the poster.

Image 4 - Source: DasGamer

Image 5 - Source: Photo by Nate "Igor" Smith

Image 6 - Source: Fantasy Pumpkins

Materialization is the second key characteristic of the anthropological approach. Materialization is "...the understanding of how the material qualities of an image intervene in the world, particularly the world of people" (Rose 220). The definition continues, "...the significance of an object does not pre-exist its social life. Any object is always actualized in a specific moment of use, which produces both the object and the sort of person looking at it" (Rose 220). Here, the real meaning behind the word "materialization" has been revealed. When a visual object is materialized through contact with a viewer, it gains significance and a social life as well as producing the type of person who views it simultaneously. Referencing Thomas (1991:4), Rose says, "An image may have a range of material qualities, but it is only when someone uses the image in some way that any of those qualities becomes activated" (Rose 220). Fairey's Obama Hope poster contained within it any number of possible interpretations or meanings, but it was only once a person viewed the image that one of those meanings was activated and the person who viewed the image was produced. Rose also references Pinney's (2004:8) concept of "'corpothetics,'" saying, "This performative understanding of the co-constitution of image and observer thus demands a fine-grained analysis of how image and people relate to each other in specific times and places, producing each in particular ways as they do" (Rose 220). Here, there is recognition that both the image and the observer play roles in the producing the other, but in relation to Obama Hope, there seems to be another factor that plays a role in the production of both the image and those would view it. This performative approach "...emphasizes that the significance of objects is not entirely determined but the meanings people place on them" (Rose 220). Here, it seems that Fairey's role in applying street art tactics to the image are allowed to affect the process of co-constitution of image and observer because he also presented the image in a different context than the original, which is why the image has taken on such icon status. Had the original version of Obama Hope been the only one, then the meaning of the image and its viewers might be completely different and its social life would most definitely be different from the social lives of all the many different versions today.

The third aspect present in the anthropological approach is that of the mobility of visual objects. Rose references Thomas' (1991) idea of the recontextualization of an object, saying, "In its social life and travels, an object passes through different cultural contexts which may modify or even transform what it means" (Rose 223). Shepard Fairey had many reproductions of his original Obama Hope poster printed. They had a completely different meaning when on the shelf waiting to be distributed than when they encountered a new cultural context in which to be seen. Then the posters were seen and some probably taken down off walls by city officials or by admirers, each in its own right being a recontextualization. The prints were recontextualized from shelf clutter with plans to street art with a message to possibly either trash or treasure, placed in a nice spot on someone's wall. Poole's (1997: 9) concept of "visual economy" is also central when examining the mobility of the Obama Hope poster (Rose 224). The term visual economy "...conveys a sense of both the circulation of images between places and the structured effects of that circulation" (Rose 223). The visual economy that surrounded the circulation of the Obama Hope posters, and any presentational form that image took on, is one that seems to have had noticeable effects. Not only did the image gain iconic status, but as a it came to represent the quality of "hope" embodied in Barack Obama, one would assume that it probably didn't hurt his campaign for the Presidency he would eventually earn. McCormick says of Fairey's approach to his art, "...given his penchant for mass saturation and the social nature of his activities, every Fairey campaign (political or commercial) has a proven ability not just to get people to look but to buy, identify, wear, participate and spread the message, even when it could mean that they themselves might be breaking the law" (McCormick 53). Fairey's Obama Hope created a visual economy not only by helping the Obama campaign, but also by creating an image that people were eager to replicate for actual economical gain.

As one of the most recognizable images in recent memory, the Obama Hope poster has gained iconic status as representative of one of the key words advocated by the Obama campaign: hope. Each different presentational form of the poster is equated with the iconic image, making each instance of the image just as authentic as the next.

Works Cited
McCormick, Carlo. "HOPEFUL DISOBEDIENCE." Art in America 97 (2009): 51-54. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Sothwestern University, Georgetown, TX. 31 Mar. 2009 http://web.ebscohost.com.navigator.southwestern.edu.

Batchen, Geoffrey. "Vernacular Photographies." Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History. Cambridge: The MIT P, 2002. 56-80.

Kennedy, Randy. "Outlaws at the Art Museum (and Not for a Heist)." New York Times 25 Jan. 2009, New York ed., WK sec.: 3-3. NYTimes.com. 24 Jan. 2009. 30 Mar. 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/weekinreview/25kennedy.html?_r=1.

"Now on View: Portrait of Barack Obama by Shepard Fairey." National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog. 17 Jan. 2009. Smithsonian Institute. 31 Mar. 2009 http://face2face.si.edu/my_weblog/2009/01/now-on-view-portrait-of-barack-obama-by-shepard-fairey.html.

Rose, Gillian. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. Second ed. London: SAGE, 2007.