A Flower in Her Hair, a Rifle on Her Shoulder
She is shown in profile, and the first thing you register is not the gun. It is the calm. A young woman turns her face to the right of the frame, chin level, gaze fixed on something outside the picture. Behind her ear, tucked into dark hair, sits a tropical flower — a hibiscus, its petals splayed open like a small red announcement. She could be walking to a market, to a wedding, to the sea. Then the eye travels down and the reading collapses in on itself: an M16-style assault rifle is slung barrel-forward over her shoulder, the long line of it cutting across the composition like a sentence you did not want to finish. On the satchel at her side, an OBEY star. Around her, a dense ornamental red — a patterned ground worked to the edges, decorative and suffocating at once. This is Duality of Humanity 2, the second screenprint in Shepard Fairey's five-part cycle from 2008, and it is the set's most lyrical, most quietly devastating statement of its central idea: that beauty and violence are not opposites but neighbors, and that war does not arrive only in the bodies of grinning men.
The Duality of Humanity series is a collaboration between Fairey — working under his OBEY GIANT banner, and fresh off the cultural detonation of his 2008 Obama "HOPE" image — and the legendary combat photographer Al Rockoff. Each of the five prints is based on one of Rockoff's reference photographs. The subject matter reaches back to the Vietnam War and the fall of Phnom Penh, but Fairey's stated intent was to let those older images speak to a newer war: the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the conflict still grinding on as he made the set in 2008 and 2009. The series is, in the most literal sense, a doubling — a past war laid over a present one, so that neither can be looked at innocently. In this article, the second of five, we stay with the woman in profile, and with the thread she pulls tighter than any of her siblings: the presence of the feminine in war, the flower against the gun, and the way beauty complicates — rather than softens — our reading of violence.
Al Rockoff and the Source Photograph
To understand any single print in this cycle, you have to understand the man whose eye stands behind all five. Al Rockoff is a combat photographer who worked through the Vietnam War and the fall of Cambodia — the collapse of Phnom Penh as the Khmer Rouge took the city. For a generation of viewers, Rockoff is best known secondhand: he was portrayed by John Malkovich in the 1984 film The Killing Fields, the wiry, difficult, fearless photographer who stays when everyone with sense is leaving. But the film is a portrait of a portraitist. The real work is in the photographs, and it is those photographs — not the movie, not the legend — that Fairey took as his reference material for the Duality of Humanity prints.
Fairey has been direct about why. "Al Rockoff's photos reveal the brutality, but also the conflicted humanity seen in war," he said of the collaboration. "The risks Rockoff took to capture his images were often as great as the risks of the subjects he wished to document." And, more plainly still: "I am honored to be able to work with Al Rockoff." That phrase — conflicted humanity — is the entire program of the series compressed into two words, and nowhere is it more exposed than in this second print. A grinning soldier reads as conflicted the moment you notice the peace pendant at his throat, which is exactly the tension the first print is built on. But a young woman with a flower in her hair and a rifle on her shoulder does not need a second symbol to become conflicted. She is conflicted in a single glance. The duality is not layered onto her; it is her.
It is worth pausing on the ethics embedded in Fairey's second sentence, because it recurs across the cycle and it matters here. Rockoff's risks, Fairey says, were "often as great as the risks of the subjects he wished to document." That is a statement about the moral position of the war photographer — a figure who does not fight, does not flee, but stands close enough to be killed in order to make an image that outlives the moment. When Fairey converts a Rockoff photograph into a screenprint, he inherits that ethical charge and passes it on to us. We are looking at a woman someone chose to photograph, in conditions where photographing was dangerous, and Fairey is asking us to honor both the seen and the seer. The interpretation offered throughout this article — the flower as innocence, the profile as icon, the woman as the war's overlooked participant — is exactly that: interpretation. What is verifiable is that the image began in Rockoff's lens and passed through Fairey's stencils, and that both men were interested less in a verdict than in the discomfort of holding two truths at once.
The 2008 Moment: Vietnam Looking at Iraq
The set was made at a specific and loaded moment. In 2008, Fairey was the most talked-about image-maker in America; the "HOPE" portrait had leapt from the street into the national bloodstream, and Fairey — long a poster artist, skateboarder, and propagandist of his own invented mythology — suddenly had a mainstream platform. He spent some of that attention on this: a five-print meditation on war, released as the Iraq conflict entered its sixth year with no clean end in sight. The choice to reach back to Rockoff's Vietnam and Cambodia photographs rather than commission or appropriate contemporary Iraq imagery is the whole argument. Fairey is not reporting on a war. He is drawing a line between two of them, insisting that the emotions of Vietnam — the moral vertigo, the blurred line between combatant and civilian, the youth of the people caught inside it — did not end in 1975. They returned, wearing different uniforms, on different sand.
Duality of Humanity 2 carries that argument through its subject in a way the other prints do not. The men of the series — the soldier of print 1, the machine-gunner of print 3 — read immediately as figures of war. We have a visual vocabulary for them, decades of it. The woman does not fit that vocabulary, and that friction is the point. Women appear in every war as combatants, as civilians caught in the machinery, as survivors who carry the aftermath for the rest of their lives, and yet the iconography of war remains overwhelmingly male. By placing a woman at the center of the second print — early in the sequence, before the children of prints 4 and 5 — Fairey widens the frame of who war belongs to. The set moves, across its five images, from adults to children, from the expected faces of conflict to the ones we would rather not see holding weapons at all. The woman is the hinge. She is adult, and so she belongs with the soldiers; she is feminine and flower-crowned, and so she anticipates the vulnerability of the children still to come.
A Close Reading: The Profile, the Flower, the Feminine in War
The profile as icon
Fairey has chosen the profile, and the choice is not neutral. The profile is one of the oldest formats in the history of the human image. It is the view stamped onto coins and struck into medals; it is the Renaissance portrait medallion, the cameo, the format reserved for rulers, saints, and the honored dead. A profile flattens a face into a silhouette, a readable edge — which is precisely why it has always been the format of the icon rather than the snapshot. You do not catch someone in profile; you enshrine them in it. When Fairey renders this young woman in strict profile, he is borrowing that entire tradition. He is treating her the way a mint treats a monarch. The effect is to elevate her — to say, without a word, that this face deserves the format of memory, the format of the coin, the format we reserve for people who matter.
And then he hangs a rifle across the medallion. The dissonance is structural, built into the very grammar of the image. The profile promises permanence, dignity, the sealed calm of something struck in metal. The M16 promises the opposite: contingency, violence, a life that could end in the next frame. The serenity of the profile versus the rifle is the same essential opposition the whole series runs on, but here it is carried entirely by form. There is no need for a peace symbol to be legible against the weapon, as there is in the first print's pendant-against-ammunition; the beauty of the profile is the peace symbol, and the rifle is the war. Fairey has found a way to state the duality without a single added emblem, using nothing but the oldest portrait format in the world and the most recognizable weapon of the modern era.
The flower
Then there is the flower. A red hibiscus — or a tropical bloom of that family — tucked into her hair, resting just where a woman might place a flower on an ordinary morning in a warm country. Read one way, it is the most innocent object in the entire five-print set. A flower in the hair is a gesture of self-adornment, of ordinary vanity and ordinary joy; it belongs to peace, to courtship, to festival, to the simple human wish to be beautiful. It is what you do when the world is safe enough to be decorated. Placed against the rifle, that innocence turns unbearable. The flower insists that this woman had, or wanted, or once had a life in which flowers made sense — and the gun insists that she does not have it now.
There is a second reading available, and Fairey, a lifelong student of protest imagery, surely knew it. The flower placed against the gun is one of the defining images of the anti-war movement that grew out of Vietnam — the flower in the rifle barrel, the bloom offered to the line of bayonets, the "flower power" gesture that turned a soft thing into a hard argument. By tucking the flower into the woman's hair rather than the rifle's barrel, Fairey keeps the association alive but changes its grammar. The flower is not being used as a weapon of protest here; it is simply part of her, and its meaning is more ambiguous and more painful for that. Is she a combatant who has not surrendered her femininity? A civilian forced to carry a weapon she never wanted? The print does not say, and its refusal to say is the source of its power. What is certain is that the flower and the rifle occupy the same body, and the viewer is not permitted to resolve them.
How beauty complicates violence
This is the print's deepest and most uncomfortable achievement, and it deserves to be named directly: beauty does not soften the violence here. It sharpens it. There is a lazy version of this image that would use the woman's beauty to make war more palatable — the glamorous fighter, the pin-up with a gun, violence made sexy and therefore safe. Fairey does not do that. The beauty of the profile, the tenderness of the flower, the youth in the face — these do not make the rifle easier to look at. They make it harder. We are more disturbed by a weapon in the hands of someone we find beautiful and young than by the same weapon in the hands of the grinning soldier of print 1, because beauty triggers our protective instincts and the rifle overrides them, and the collision of those two responses is genuinely painful. Fairey is exploiting a real feature of how we look at faces: we extend more care to those we find beautiful, and the image weaponizes that care against us. You want to protect her. You cannot. She is armed.
Set her against her siblings and the strategy comes into focus. The grinning male soldier of the first print wears his duality on the surface — the ammunition and the peace pendant, brutality and belief side by side, a man who has made some kind of peace with the contradiction. The defiant boy and the younger, self-soothing child of prints 4 and 5 wear the tragedy of war made small, war handed to those who should have been protected from it. The woman sits between these poles and belongs fully to neither. She has the adult's composure and the child's vulnerability, the soldier's weapon and the civilian's flower. If the cycle is a spectrum from the hardened man to the unprotected child, she is the exact midpoint, and the flower in her hair is the note that carries across the whole octave.
Peace Symbols and Ornament: Threads Across the Cycle
The recurring motif of peace
One of the pleasures — and it is a grim pleasure — of reading the Duality prints together is watching Fairey plant emblems of peace inside images of war, then dare you to reconcile them. In the first print, it is explicit: a peace pendant hangs at the soldier's throat, catching the ammunition slung across his chest in a single frame. That is the series' thesis stated as a badge. In Duality of Humanity 2, the peace motif is not a pendant but the flower — a softer, less doctrinaire symbol, but one that performs the same function. It is the object in the image that belongs to a world without war, placed inside a world that has one. Where the soldier's pendant is chosen, ideological, worn on purpose, the woman's flower is intimate and possibly involuntary — a piece of who she is rather than what she believes. The cycle thus offers two grammars of peace-in-war: the emblem you pin on, and the beauty you cannot take off.
Ornament as counterpoint to violence
Look again at the ground behind her. It is not empty. Fairey has filled the space around the figure with a dense ornamental pattern in red — the decorative, near-wallpaper density that runs through his work and, in this series, through the machine-gunner of print 3, where the ornament all but drowns the figure. This patterning is one of Fairey's signature moves, borrowed from the visual languages of propaganda posters, Art Nouveau, and the decorative arts, and in the Duality prints it does specific work. Ornament is the language of beauty, order, and craft — of things made to be looked at and enjoyed. Wrapping a figure of war in ornament creates a counterpoint, a formal argument that runs parallel to the flower-versus-gun tension in the foreground. The eye is seduced by the pattern and then snagged on the weapon; the decorative surface makes the violent content go down easier and, in doing so, implicates us in our own willingness to find war beautiful. Across the set, ornament is the connective tissue: it binds the man, the woman, and the machine-gunner into a single decorative program, so that the horror is always wearing a beautiful dress. In print 2, the ornament and the profile-medallion format reinforce each other — both are formats of enshrinement, both dignify, both are undercut by the rifle they surround.
Technique: Screenprint, Palette, and the Rubylith Hand
The version most collectors encounter is the signed and numbered screenprint: an edition of 450, printed on cream speckletone paper, at roughly 18 by 24 inches in landscape orientation. It was released on July 16, 2008, priced at $50, and it sold out. Those are the facts of the object. What they do not convey is how much the technique carries the meaning.
Start with the palette: red, cream, and black. It is a restricted three-color scheme, and it is the shared genetic code of the entire series — every one of the five prints speaks it. The choice is doing several things at once. Red is the color of blood and the color of revolution, of danger and of passion; it is also, not incidentally, the color of the Communist iconography that shadowed both the Vietnam and Cambodia conflicts, and the color of the propaganda-poster tradition Fairey has mined his whole career. Black gives the image its structure — the hard graphic edges, the silhouette of the profile, the unmistakable line of the rifle. And cream, the color of the bare paper showing through, is the note of relief, the breathing room, the closest the palette comes to peace. In this print the red dominates: it fills the ornamental ground and saturates the flower, so that the bloom and the field it sits in are the same color, and the woman's calm face is drawn in the darker lines against that red heat. The palette is not decoration. It is the argument in pigment — blood and revolution as the ground, the human face drawn in relief against it.
The screenprint process itself matters to how the image reads. Screenprinting builds an image in flat, discrete layers of color, each pushed through a stencil, which is why Fairey's work has its poster-like graphic punch — no gradients to hide in, every shape committed and clean. That flatness is what makes the profile read as an icon rather than a portrait; a screenprint cannot render the soft continuous tone of a photograph, so it converts Rockoff's photographic reference into a bold, reduced, emblematic image. The medium performs the enshrinement. It turns a woman someone photographed into a woman someone struck, like a coin.
Beyond the open edition of 450, the Duality series exists in a range of scarcer, more fine-art variants, and collectors should understand the ladder. There are HPMs — hand-painted multiples — produced on paper and on wood, where Fairey works additional hand-painted passes over the printed base, making each one unique. There are canvas versions. There are murals, taking the imagery to architectural scale. And, at the top of the ladder in terms of process and scarcity, there are the original hand-cut Rubylith works. Rubylith is a red-tinted masking film that the artist cuts by hand to create the stencils from which screenprints are made; the hand-cut Rubylith originals are, in effect, the physical matrix of the image, the artist's own hand at the source of the whole edition. They are the rarest and most sought-after objects in the series, sitting well above the numbered paper prints in both scarcity and price. The important point for a collector is that "Duality of Humanity 2" is not one object but a family of them, and the value of any given piece depends enormously on where it sits on that ladder — from the $50 open-edition print of 2008 to the singular Rubylith at the top.
Where Print 2 Sits in the Cycle
The five prints of Duality of Humanity are designed to be read together, and each earns its place through contrast. If you lay the set out in sequence, an arc emerges — a movement from adults to children, from the expected faces of war to the ones that indict us most. Prints 1 through 3 give us adults: the grinning soldier, the woman in profile, the ornament-drenched machine-gunner. Prints 4 and 5 give us children: the defiant boy with the M16, and the younger boy caught in a gesture of self-soothing beneath a radiant halo. The horror deepens as the subjects get younger, because the weapon stays the same size while the person holding it shrinks.
Within that arc, print 2 is the lyrical counterpoint — the print that trades the surface-level, emblem-driven duality of its siblings for something carried entirely by beauty. The soldier needs his peace pendant to complicate him. The machine-gunner needs the ornament to nearly swallow him. The children need the sheer wrongness of a child with a weapon to make their point. The woman needs none of that. Her duality is inherent, wordless, structural — the profile against the rifle, the flower against the gun, the beauty against the violence. She is the note of tenderness in a set otherwise built on shock and irony, and she is early enough in the sequence to set the terms of feeling before the children arrive to break your heart. Contrast her directly with the grinning male soldier of print 1 — his readable, almost jaunty acceptance of contradiction against her serene refusal to explain herself — and then against the defiant boy and the self-soothing child who follow, and you understand what she is for. She is the bridge from the world of the soldier to the world of the child, and the flower in her hair is what carries you across.
Collecting and the Market
For collectors, Duality of Humanity 2 offers a well-defined entry point into a coherent, historically serious body of Fairey's work, and a genuine choice about how deep to go. The most accessible object is the signed and numbered screenprint — edition of 450, cream speckletone, roughly 18 by 24 inches, red/cream/black — originally released at $50 in July 2008 and long since sold out. Above it sits the ladder of variants described earlier: HPMs on paper and wood, canvas versions, murals, and the hand-cut Rubylith originals at the rarest and finest-art end.
On the secondary market, the picture is directional rather than precise, and it should be treated that way. Drawing on Gauntlet's master comps over a roughly five-year window, signed prints from the Duality of Humanity series have shown a median around $453, with a broad observed range from roughly $169 to $1,100 — a spread that reflects condition, edition variant, sale venue, and the eternal volatility of the print market. Within that set, Duality of Humanity 2 tends to sit in the mid-range, with observed results clustering around $350 to $500 for the standard signed print. These figures are directional secondary-market context, not appraisals; they describe where the print has traded, not what any specific example is worth, and the scarcer variants — particularly the Rubyliths — operate on an entirely different and higher tier that a median of signed paper prints does not capture.
A few things move value within the range in predictable ways. Condition is paramount for a work on cream paper, where handling, light exposure, and toning show readily. Provenance and a clean signature-and-numbering profile matter. And the specific object type — open-edition print versus HPM versus Rubylith — is the single largest determinant of price, far outweighing small differences in condition among otherwise comparable prints. A buyer serious about the series should decide first which rung of the ladder they are buying, then evaluate condition and provenance within that rung. For a fuller picture of how Fairey's editions are priced and what drives the numbers, see our Shepard Fairey Price Guide, and for a broader orientation to buying his work, the Shepard Fairey Buyer's Guide.
Authentication: Fairey Keeps No Central Registry
Here is the point that trips up newcomers to the market, and it is worth stating plainly: Shepard Fairey operates no central authentication service. There is no "Pest Control" for Fairey — that is Banksy's body, and it authenticates only Banksy's work. Anyone who tells you a Fairey print has been "authenticated by his studio's official board" or run through some central Fairey verification service is describing something that does not exist. This is not a gap or a failing; it is simply how Fairey's market works, and understanding it is the first line of defense against fakes.
Authentication of a Duality of Humanity 2 print therefore rests on the convergence of several independent factors rather than on a single certificate. The starting point is the OBEY GIANT archive at obeygiant.com, which documents Fairey's releases — the edition size, the release date, the format — and lets you confirm that the object in front of you matches the record for that print. From there, the work is evidentiary: the consistency of the signature and the numbering against known authentic examples; the correctness of the physical object (paper stock, dimensions, palette, print quality) against the documented specifications; and a coherent chain of provenance tracing the piece back toward its origin. No single one of these is conclusive on its own, but together they build the case. For a step-by-step walkthrough of the specific tells and traps for this artist, consult our guide on how to spot a fake Shepard Fairey. The short version: trust the convergence of archive, signature, object, and provenance — and be immediately skeptical of anyone invoking an authentication authority that Fairey has never had.
The Full Cycle
Duality of Humanity 2 is the lyrical heart of the series — the print where Fairey states his theme not with an emblem but with a face, a flower, and the oldest portrait format in the world turned against a modern rifle. To read it fully is to read it against its four siblings, each of which sounds the same theme in a different register. Together they form a single argument about war, made in red, cream, and black, drawn from Al Rockoff's photographs and pointed at the wars of our own moment.
- Duality of Humanity 1 — the grinning soldier, ammunition and peace pendant worn together: the series' thesis stated as a badge.
- Duality of Humanity 2 — the woman in profile, flower against rifle: the beauty that complicates violence (this article).
- Duality of Humanity 3 — the ornament-drenched machine-gunner, where decoration nearly swallows the figure.
- Duality of Humanity 4 — the defiant boy with an M16, war handed to a child.
- Duality of Humanity 5 — the younger boy, self-soothing beneath a radiant halo: the cycle's most vulnerable note.
To go deeper into Fairey's work and market, explore the full Shepard Fairey Index, consult the Price Guide and Buyer's Guide, learn the tells in How to Spot a Fake Shepard Fairey, or browse available works in our Shepard Fairey collection.
