"Icon #3," based on a poster of Imam Reza, whose shrine at Mashhad is one of Iran's most visited pilgrimage sites, presents a woman garbed in green (the symbol of Iran's opposition movement), her eyes welling with tears.
Recognising one of the science editors at an academic conference in London a couple of months later, I approached him with a story idea based on a poster at the conference.
Each poster is based on a World War II-era poster.
The A.P. then filed an infringement suit against Mr. Fairey, who has acknowledged that the poster was based on a photograph of Mr. Obama taken in 2006 by Mannie Garcia, a freelance photographer.
Andy Warhol's silkscreen image of Marilyn Monroe, Roy Lichtenstein's parodied compositions of Mickey Mouse, and Shepard Fairey's HOPE poster of Obama based on a copyrighted photograph are examples of a venerable tradition in modern art that Prince is next-in-line to follow.
A collaged work made by Mr. Fairey based on the poster was acquired in early 2009 by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, part of the Smithsonian Institution, and is now in its permanent collection, along with portraits of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart, and Richard M. Nixon by Norman Rockwell.
The poster could have been emblazoned with the words "based on a true story".
This 1946 poster was based on an image of a starving prisoner in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
In 2007 the Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma opened an exhibition of Biblical images in art and pop culture, including a poster for Let My Babies Go!: A Passover Story, the picture book based on "A Rugrats Passover".
