Shepard Fairey Sues AP Over Obama Poster

Dion Archibald - March 4th

Barack Obama campaign poster is still in the news even though people now refer to the subject as President Obama. Fairey has filed a lawsuit against The Associated Press, requesting the judge to state that he is “protected from copyright infringement claims.

The Barack Obama photograph used in the Fairey poster was taken by freelance photographer Mannie Garcia for The Associated Press in 2006. The AP recently demanded a portion of any money made from the image, and now the artist has decided to the let a federal judge figure out if the matter is a copyright infringement.

A lawyer for Fairey, Anthony T. Falzone, said the Garcia photograph was transformed into a “stunning, abstracted and idealized visual image that created powerful new meaning and conveys a radically different message.

Shepard Fairey is also currently showing at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.