Scene on the Road

After almost a year now, credit for the photo source of the very first Shepard Fairey Obama poster (above, left) can be given properly to photographer Mannie Garcia. He joins previously credited photographers David C. Turney (center) and Brooks Kraft (right), who provided the basis for two of Fairey's works later in the election year.

Since my last post two days ago ended with my falling asleep, I wanted to update a few things, and maybe call this my last full post on the Obama Poster Photo Source topic. As I said to a few commenters on Wednesday, then I can go back to blogging about shooting newspaper weather feature photos and living vicariously through the adventures of my bigger-city photojournalism colleagues.

Mannie did call me back that morning, and when we first talked he was in the White House already covering President Obama's very first day on the job. He is still freelancing in Washington, DC, currently covering the White House and Capital Hill for Bloomberg News. He told me when he saw my email telling him he was the photographer, "At first I was kind of confused. Then it hit me, and I thought wow. That's why it always seemed so familiar."

Of the iconic poster he said, "I've been on the campaign for twenty something months, so I would see the artwork, I would photograph it, and think what is with this image? But it didn't snap. It never occurred to me it was my picture. I thought, 'that's familiar.' I would see it and say that's cool, but it did keep sticking in my head." He was quick to add he is not mad at Fairey, and he's not looking at any lawsuits. "I know artists like to look at things; they see things and they make stuff. It's a really cool piece of work. I wouldn't mind getting a signed litho or something from the artist to put up on my wall."

I talked with him again this morning, and he is still proud his photo is the basis of the painting that now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, a part of the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC - the first portrait of the new president to enter the national collection.

Speaking of hanging on walls, The Danziger Projects Gallery is working with the AP to include Mannie's photo in their "CAN & DID - Graphics, Art, and Photography from the Obama Campaign" exhibit that just opened on inauguration day in New York - and in a limited edition of custom archival prints by master printmaker David Adamson.

The gallery's James Danziger, through his The Year in Pictures blog was also responsible for bringing the whole mystery to a wider audience than I could ever possibly reach with my blog. This "HOPEfully Last Post on the Topic" is also opportunity to put all the credit - and links - in one place, and recognize some of the many web-sleuths out there, like him, who didn't give up on finding the photo.

As near as I can tell, there could have been talk about the source photo on a forum on Expresso Beans that started with a thread almost exactly one year ago - Jan 25, 2008 - beginning with an image of the Obama "Progress" poster and a statement attributed to Shepard Fairey in support of candidate Barack Obama promising that "proceeds from this print go to produce prints for a large statewide poster campaign." That forum - for admirers, collectors and sellers of Fairey's Obama artwork - was offered up as a clue in more than one email or comment I received. I initially looked there, but with almost 4,000 posts on over 200 pages of discussion about how many different ways the artist signed the "F" on his autographed posters and whether they are printed on cream or white stock, I gave up. I did learn on the site that signed and numbered screen prints of the original "Progress" run of 350 have sold for as much as $5500. on ebay, with the latest sale listed - on Jan. 21st - for $3152.

I don't know if anyone else ever looked there, but it was Mike Cramer, a computer programmer here in Philadelphia, who was the first to point to the Reuters photo by Jim Young. He found it, as Fairey said he had, by doing a Google images search.

The photo was illustrating a time.com story which as it turned out, was mis-credited to Jonathan Daniel with Getty Images. James Danziger, also alerted by Cramer's comment, cleared all that up by talking to Daniel and then Time picture editor Mark Rykoff. Meanwhile, by the time I read my email a few hours later and talked with Cramer, Rykoff had already fixed the Reuters credit on his website. All I had to do was start trying to contact Young, who coincidentally had just posted a piece on the Reuters blog about shooting black and white film with his $25 plastic Holga camera. I left a comment there, and later that night ended up talking with him and his boss Gary Hershorn, Reuters Pictures Editor for North America. Jim shot the photo in January of 2007 during testimony in the Senate confirmation hearings for Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte.

It took just a few days for links to alternative photos to start showing up as comments on the blogs of everyone involved in the search. Graphic artists wrote that everyone was giving too much credit to Fairey's use of Photoshop image manipulation tools. We photo people just assumed the artist did some work on it, including adding the rest of the necktie and shoulders. That's why we were so willing to accept the Reuters photo as the source. Portrait artists offered that they would never flip a person's face.

One of the very first sites to be linked to with the new photo was an October 2006 blog post on the Intrepid Liberal Journal by information professional Robert Ellman. He used the photo to illustrate a hypothetical Obama inauguration speech. Ironically, the sleuths began hitting on his page just hours before Obama would be making his actual address.

There were also links passed around to the picture at photobucket.com, starmedia.com and with a 2006 CBSnews.com story. The photo was also found by many sleuths paired up with one of Senator John McCain on a political website from just a few months ago in the general election.

Throughout Inauguration Day, bloggers were copying the Obama headshot into Photoshop to determine how close it really was. By this time most were certain the photo - which appeared to have been taken by the Associated Press sometime in 2006 - was the one.

Steve Simula compared it (above) to the Reuters photo on his Flickr page. Digital photography instructor Nathan Lunstrum also created a composite and posted it as more evidence on his blog, Amble On. Like Nathan and a few others, Chris Perley (below) rotated it just slightly, layered it over the HOPE poster, and then changed the opacity so you can see both together.

With the actual image now nailed down, all that remained then was determining the true source of the photo and the identity of the photographer. As I drove back from covering the inauguration in Washington that night I fully expected someone would have found the answer by the time I woke in the morning.

But, I couldn't get to sleep, so inspired by all the sleuthing by others, I decided to do some detective work of my own. It didn't take long, especially with all the clues others had already dug up. I kept searching for different versions of the photo, downloading them, and opening the embedded caption files and metadata. As most of the images on the web are there as a result of cutting and pasting, right-clicking and saving from other sites, almost every picture I opened had been stripped of all that information...

...until I got to a photo on pennlive.com with a Pennsylvania Primary story.

That photo had a full caption, complete with Mannie Garcia's name.

It is entirely possible there are others who found Mannie's name first but didn't get any recognition. Others may have posted comments on a blog somewhere and could still be waiting for them to be approved. But the entire discovery process was really a collaborative effort between everyone who cared about such things. Someday, new or existing software will be perfected to better search images on the web. But until then, photos like this will only be found through luck or perseverance. Like former Time magazine photojournalist Dirck Halstead looking for days through his slides to find a photograph of President Clinton hugging Monica Lewinsky in a crowd of people that was shot well before the scandal broke.

Also, in response to other bloggers and angry emails that I'm trying to somehow diminish Fairey's work ("...are you saying Grant Wood isn't an artist because he used his sister and a dentist as a basis for American Gothic?") or do an "expose" or "force a copyright case," my own quest for the source image stemmed only from my curiosity as a photographer and a journalist.

The poster is beautiful and will no doubt someday end up in art books along with "American Gothic." When I first saw it in West Philadelphia last winter during the Pennsylvania Primary, I was so impressed by its social movement propaganda hip street art look, I walked over to get a closer look. It was too sophisticated to be from the local Obama office, or for that matter, even from his national campaign. So I was intrigued.

I always figured the source photo was made by a White House photographer - someone who has shot thousands of headshots of familiar political faces. Otherwise, I guessed a photographer shooting Obama up close just one time in their life would have shown the pictures to all their friends, and have memorized every single detail of their photos.

Anyway, now we just need to hear what Shepard Fairey thinks. He was on NPR's Fresh Air on inauguration day, before Mannie Garcia was identified - but well after the Reuters photo was found. You can listen to the whole interview here (Fast forward to the 13 minute mark to hear just the photo part).

Host Terry Gross asks him, "I'm wondering if you'd like to give a shout out to the photographer whose image that came from?"

Fairey replies: "You know, I actually don't know who the photographer is...but, whoever you are, thank you..."