A Small Hand at the Mouth: How "Duality of Humanity 5" Ends the Cycle
Look first at the hand. Everything about Shepard Fairey's Duality of Humanity 5 (2009) begins there. A boy stands facing us. An M16 rifle is slung across his front, hanging at his waist with the dull inevitability of a tool he did not choose. And yet the gesture that arrests the eye is not the weapon. It is the small, childlike lift of a hand toward the mouth — fingers and thumb hovering near the lips in the oldest self-soothing motion there is, the one a child makes when the world has become too large. His eyes are uncertain. Behind him, a radiant sunburst of rays fans outward, and the dense ornamental ground is woven through with peace symbols. Red, cream, and black. That is the whole image. It is also, we will argue across the next several thousand words, the quiet, devastating resolution the entire Duality of Humanity series had been building toward.
This is the fifth and final print in the cycle, released on June 9, 2009, in an edition of 450, screenprinted on cream paper, roughly 24 by 18 inches, signed and numbered, offered at $50 and sold out. Fairey himself framed it plainly: the print "is entitled Duality of Humanity 5 and is, of course, part of the DOH Series." The words "of course" carry more weight than they seem to. By 2009, the series had a shape, a logic, a set of recurring subjects and motifs. Number five was not a new departure. It was a homecoming — and a closing of the door.
To understand why a frightened child with a raised hand belongs at the end of this particular meditation, we have to gather every thread the series had been spinning: the combat photographer whose witness made the images possible, the peace symbol that recurs and finally reaches its fullest statement here, the ornamental patterning and the propaganda halo, the deliberate parallel Fairey drew between Vietnam and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the red/cream/black palette that binds the five prints into one object, and above all the human beings at the center of each frame — the grinning soldier, the young woman, the machine-gunner, the defiant older boy, and now the youngest and most fragile of them all. This article is written to close the cycle. So we will begin at the source.
Al Rockoff and the Photographer's Witness
The Duality of Humanity series is a collaboration. That word matters, because Fairey has been accused across his career of appropriating imagery without acknowledgment, and here the acknowledgment is the whole point. Every image in the cycle is based on the reference photographs of Al Rockoff, an American combat photographer who documented the Vietnam War and the fall of Phnom Penh in Cambodia. Rockoff is not a household name, but he has a strange foothold in popular memory: he was portrayed by John Malkovich in the 1984 film The Killing Fields, the account of the Khmer Rouge's capture of the Cambodian capital and the horrors that followed. Rockoff was there. He photographed it. He nearly died doing it.
Fairey has been unusually direct about what Rockoff's work means to him and to these prints. "Al Rockoff's photos reveal the brutality, but also the conflicted humanity seen in war," he said. "The risks Rockoff took to capture his images were often as great as the risks of the subjects he wished to document." And, more simply: "I am honored to be able to work with Al Rockoff." Read those lines against the boy in number five and they change color. The photographer risked his life to stand close enough to a child holding a rifle to see the hand drift toward the mouth. The duality Fairey names — brutality and conflicted humanity, held in the same frame — is not an abstraction he imposed. It is what Rockoff saw, and what the camera preserved, and what the screenprint now hands to us.
This is the first thread the finale gathers up. Across Duality of Humanity 1, with its grinning soldier draped in ammunition and a peace pendant; Duality of Humanity 2, the young woman with a rifle and a flower; Duality of Humanity 3, the ornament-drenched machine-gunner; and Duality of Humanity 4, the defiant boy with an M16 — the constant beneath all five is the photographer's presence. Someone stood there. Someone chose to look and not turn away. Fairey's ornamental treatment can read, at a glance, as decoration; the peace symbols and rays can look like graphic flourish. But the substrate is always a real moment that a real person risked himself to record. The finale, precisely because it is the most vulnerable image, makes that debt to the witness impossible to ignore. You cannot look at this child and file the series under "cool poster art." Rockoff won't let you, and neither will Fairey.
2009: The Wars Unfinished
Timing is meaning. Duality of Humanity 1 through 4 were released in 2008. Number five came the following June — June 9, 2009. That gap of roughly a year is the difference between two eras, and it is essential to reading the finale correctly.
The series was conceived, in Fairey's stated intent, to parallel the emotions of the Vietnam War with the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the war that followed. When the first four prints appeared in 2008, the United States was in the final year of an administration that had defined itself by that invasion. The imagery of grinning soldiers and defiant fighters carried a charge of protest, of accusation, aimed at a war that a large part of the country had turned against. Fairey, by 2008, was also the man who had made HOPE — the poster that became the visual signature of Barack Obama's campaign, arguably the most reproduced political image of its generation.
And then the campaign ended, and the candidate won, and by June 2009 the HOPE era had turned into the governing era. This is the ground on which the finale lands. Number five arrives after the catharsis of the election, into a moment when the wars Fairey had been protesting did not end. They continued. The change of administration did not close Iraq or Afghanistan; the child soldier's rifle did not vanish because a hopeful poster had done its work. There is something almost unbearably pointed about closing a war series with the most fragile figure yet, in the exact months when a country that had voted for hope was discovering that hope does not, by itself, bring anyone home.
Hold the two facts together: Fairey made the poster that promised a turning, and Fairey ended this series on a frightened child. Number five is not cynical about that — nothing in the palette or composition sneers — but it refuses easy resolution. The Vietnam-to-Iraq parallel was always about recurrence, about how the emotions of one war rhyme with the next. To close in 2009 on a boy self-soothing under a false halo is to say, quietly, that the rhyme had not stopped. That is the historical work the finale performs, and it could only perform it because it came a year later than its siblings.
The Radiant Halo: A Deep Reading
Now we can look hard at the image itself, through the lens that this print, more than any other in the set, demands: the radiant halo, and what it does to a vulnerable body placed beneath it.
The Sunburst as Inherited Language
The sunburst is one of the most loaded devices in the entire visual history of power. Rays fanning out from behind a figure are the language of sanctity and of authority: the halo of the saint, the aureole of the martyr, the radiant glory assigned to kings, leaders, and gods across centuries of religious and political imagery. Propaganda learned this vocabulary early and never forgot it. To place a figure inside a burst of rays is to make a claim — that this person is illuminated, chosen, glorious, worthy of veneration. It is the graphic grammar of the icon.
Fairey knows this grammar better than almost any living artist; his entire OBEY project is a study in the mechanics of propaganda and the aesthetics of authority. So when he sets the boy of Duality of Humanity 5 inside a radiant sunburst, he is deploying the most exalted device in the propaganda toolkit. And then he undermines it completely. The figure the rays are meant to glorify is a child who is frightened. The halo promises a hero, a martyr, a leader; the body beneath it delivers uncertainty and a hand creeping toward the mouth. The iconography of glory has been turned, deliberately, to unease.
The Self-Soothing Gesture
The gesture is the fulcrum of the whole print. A raised hand, fingers and thumb near the lips — this is not a salute, not a fist, not a trigger finger. It is the motion of a person comforting themselves, the reflexive childhood gesture of a hand seeking the mouth when there is nothing else to hold onto. Every element around it argues for a hero: the rays, the frontal stance, the rifle that marks him as a combatant. The hand argues the opposite. It says he is a child, and he is afraid, and the weapon and the glory have been strapped onto someone far too young to carry either.
This is the "duality" of the series title made almost unbearably literal. Weapon and vulnerability, glory and fear, the iconography of the martyr and the biology of a frightened kid, all resident in one small body. The other prints hold their dualities at arm's length — the soldier's grin, the flower against the rifle, the ornament wrapped around the gun. Number five collapses the distance. The dual halves are not two objects juxtaposed; they are one child, glorified and terrified in the same instant.
The Uncertain Eyes
Follow the eyes. In Duality of Humanity 4, the older boy is defiant — his stance and gaze push back at the viewer, a hardness that reads as premature adulthood, a child already learning to perform toughness. The younger boy of number five has not learned that yet, or cannot manage it here. His eyes are uncertain. He does not glare; he does not challenge. He is caught in the exposed, unguarded look of someone who does not know what is about to happen to him. That uncertainty is what makes the halo behind him feel like an accusation rather than a tribute. The rays insist on his glory; his eyes confess that he has none of the confidence glory is supposed to confer. The gap between what the composition claims and what the face admits is the entire emotional engine of the print.
The Peace Symbol Pays Off — and the Child-Soldier Pairing
A Motif Reaches Its Fullest Statement
The peace symbol has run through the Duality of Humanity series like a recurring chord. In number one, it hangs as a pendant against the ammunition — a small talisman of peace worn by a figure armored for war, the contradiction pinned directly to the chest. Across the cycle the emblem keeps surfacing in the ornamental grounds, a persistent reminder that these are, at root, anti-war images, that the machinery of conflict is being depicted precisely to indict it.
In the finale, the motif reaches its fullest and most fully integrated statement. The peace symbols are not a pendant, not a scattered accent — they are woven into the very rays, built into the dense ornamental ground that radiates around the boy. The halo of false glory and the emblem of peace occupy the same lines. This is the payoff the whole series was reaching toward. The device of authority and the device of protest have been fused into a single decorative field, so that the rays glorifying a child soldier are made from the symbol that argues he should never have been armed at all.
It is worth sitting with how much that fusion accomplishes. Throughout the cycle, peace and war are held in tension — a flower beside a rifle, a pendant over ammunition, ornament around a machine gun. The tension is always legible as tension: two opposed things placed near each other. In number five, the opposition is dissolved into the substance of the image. You cannot separate the peace symbols from the halo; they are the same graphic gesture. The finale doesn't resolve the contradiction between peace and violence by choosing a side. It resolves it by showing that, in the propaganda imagination, the two have become indistinguishable — that even the plea for peace can be absorbed into the radiant machinery that sends children to war. That is a darker, more sophisticated payoff than a simple flower-versus-gun could deliver, and it is exactly the kind of statement a finale should make.
The Two Boys, and the Adults Before Them
The cycle asks to be read as a descent, or perhaps a stripping-away. Consider the human progression across the five prints. Numbers one through three give us adults: the grinning soldier hung with ammunition and a peace pendant, the young woman holding a rifle and a flower, the machine-gunner drenched in ornament. These are grown combatants — people old enough, at least, to have some claim on the choices that put weapons in their hands. Their dualities are the dualities of adults at war: the capacity to grin while armed for killing, to hold a flower and a rifle at once, to be beautiful and lethal in the same frame.
Then the series turns to children, and the ground shifts under us. Duality of Humanity 4 gives us the defiant older boy with an M16 — young, but performing hardness, his defiance a kind of armor learned too early. And Duality of Humanity 5 gives us the youngest and most fragile of all, the boy whose armor has failed, whose hand has drifted to his mouth, whose eyes have not yet learned to hide fear. Place the two boys side by side and the finale's logic becomes clear. Number four shows the child performing the role; number five shows the child beneath the performance. The defiance of the older boy is revealed, by the vulnerability of the younger, to have been a mask all along — the same terror, wearing a harder face.
Read the whole sequence and it becomes an argument about war and innocence. The adults of one through three can, however uneasily, be imagined as agents. The boys of four and five cannot. By ending on the youngest, most defenseless figure — and by placing him beneath the grandest halo — Fairey makes the series' final claim: that the duality of humanity is at its most terrible not in the grinning adult but in the frightened child, because the child never had a choice, and the glory painted around him is the falsest of all. The cycle empties out from adult ambiguity toward childhood defenselessness. That is why it had to end here, and could not have ended anywhere else.
Technique: Screenprint, Rubylith, and the Handmade Variants
The emotional force of Duality of Humanity 5 is inseparable from how it was made. This is a screenprint on cream paper, the cream stock itself doing quiet work — warmer than white, it softens the field and lends the whole image the tone of an aged document or a faded flag. The palette is disciplined: red, cream, and black, the same three-value economy that runs through the entire series and binds the five prints into a single visual family. Red for blood and alarm and revolutionary fervor; black for the linework and shadow and the weapon; cream for the ground and the light. Three colors, endlessly recombined, is enough — and the restraint is part of the point. There is no naturalistic rendering to hide behind. The image is built from flat, deliberate shapes, which is exactly why the ornamental rays and woven peace symbols can carry so much meaning: in a three-color world, every mark is a decision.
Behind the screenprint lies the hand-cut labor that Fairey's studio is known for. The series includes hand-cut Rubylith originals — Rubylith being the red masking film that is cut by hand to create the stencils from which screens are made. This is painstaking, physical work: every curve of every ray, every peace symbol in the ornamental ground, cut by hand before it can be printed. Knowing that changes how you read the density of the pattern around the boy. That radiant field is not a filter or a digital flourish; it is cut, line by line, into film. The halo of false glory is, in the most literal sense, handmade.
Beyond the signed and numbered paper edition of 450, the finale exists — like the rest of the set — in a range of variants that reward collectors and complicate the market. There are hand-painted multiples (HPM) on both paper and wood, canvas versions, and murals. Each variant sits at a different point on the spectrum from multiple to unique object. The standard screenprint is the accessible, editioned form; the HPMs, with their hand-applied elements, move toward the one-of-a-kind; the canvases and murals are scarcer still. For the purposes of this article the key fact is simply that "Duality of Humanity 5" is not a single object but a small constellation of related works, and the version in front of you — paper screenprint, HPM, canvas — determines almost everything about its rarity and value.
The Finale's Job: Resolving, or Refusing To
Every series that runs to a fifth and final image inherits a burden: the finale is supposed to mean the ending. It has to gather the recurring motifs, honor the accumulated logic, and either resolve the central question or refuse to resolve it in a way that feels earned rather than evasive. Duality of Humanity 5 takes on this burden and answers it with real formal intelligence.
The series' central question is embedded in its title. Can humanity's duality — the coexistence of brutality and tenderness, of the capacity to make war and the capacity to make peace — be reconciled? The first four prints pose the question through adults and an older child, holding the two halves in visible tension: grin and gun, flower and rifle, ornament and machine gun, defiance and youth. Each of those images is, in a sense, a hung jury. The duality is displayed but not decided.
The finale decides — and its decision is a refusal. By placing the most vulnerable figure under the grandest false halo, by weaving the peace symbol into the very rays that glorify a child soldier, number five stages the reconciliation and shows it to be a lie. Peace and glory have been fused, yes, but into an image of a frightened child with a weapon he cannot possibly have chosen. The two halves of humanity's duality are joined here not in harmony but in horror: the emblem of peace has been conscripted into the propaganda of war. If reconciliation means the contradiction disappearing, then the finale's answer is no — the contradiction does not dissolve, it curdles.
And yet — and this is why the print is more than a polemic — the boy himself is rendered with tenderness. The hand at the mouth is observed, not mocked. The uncertain eyes are given to us with care. Fairey does not resolve the series by declaring humanity irredeemable; he resolves it by insisting we look at the most defenseless human in the whole cycle and feel, undeniably, our kinship with him. The refusal to reconcile the abstraction is paired with an absolute insistence on the concrete child. That is the finale's real achievement. It ends the intellectual argument in irresolution and ends the human one in recognition. The duality is not solved; it is felt, in the smallest possible body, and that is the only kind of ending an honest anti-war series could offer.
Collecting "Duality of Humanity 5"
For collectors, the finale occupies a distinctive place in the set. The standard object is the screenprint on cream paper, edition of 450, signed and numbered, roughly 24 by 18 inches in landscape orientation, originally released on June 9, 2009 at $50 and sold out on release. That combination — a signed, numbered Fairey screenprint from a documented anti-war series with a named photographer-collaborator — is the kind of provenance that gives an OBEY GIANT print durable collector interest.
On the secondary market, the Duality of Humanity prints as a group have shown meaningful appreciation from that $50 release price. Drawing on Gauntlet Gallery's own comparable-sales data over a five-year window, and treating these figures as directional rather than precise: signed examples across the series have carried a median in the neighborhood of ~$453, within a range running roughly from ~$169 to ~$1,100. Within that band, Duality of Humanity 5 has been observed toward the upper end — around ~$800 or more in the instances Gauntlet has tracked.
Two forces plausibly lift the finale above the series median. First, it is the closing image — the later release, the print that completes the set, and complete-set demand tends to reward the piece collectors need last. Second, it is arguably the most emotionally resonant image in the cycle, and desirability in Fairey's market tends to follow the images that hit hardest. A frightened child under a false halo is not an easy print to hang, but it is an unforgettable one, and unforgettable is what the market pays for. These dynamics are why the finale sits in the upper part of the set's range rather than the middle.
All of these numbers are directional. They reflect observed comparables over a specific window, not guarantees, and any individual sale turns on condition, edition variant, provenance, and the temperature of the room on a given day. An HPM, a canvas, or a mural version sits on an entirely different scale from the paper screenprint and should never be compared directly against the edition-of-450 figures above. For a fuller picture of how Fairey's market moves, see the Shepard Fairey Price Guide, and for the mechanics of acquiring well — condition grading, edition variants, what to ask a seller — the Shepard Fairey Buyer's Guide. The complete run of the artist's editioned work is catalogued in the Fairey Index.
Authentication: Fairey Is Silent
A point that matters enormously for anyone buying at these levels: there is no central authenticator for Shepard Fairey's work. This is a crucial distinction that trips up collectors who come to Fairey from the Banksy market. Banksy has Pest Control, a dedicated body that issues certificates and is effectively the arbiter of what is and is not authentic. Fairey has nothing equivalent. There is no office you can write to, no committee that will bless or condemn a given impression, no certificate that functions as the last word.
What that means in practice is that authentication of Duality of Humanity 5 — as with every Fairey print — rests on a convergence of evidence rather than a single stamp of approval. The pillars of that evidence are:
- The OBEY GIANT archive and release record. The finale has a documented release: June 9, 2009, edition of 450, at $50. A legitimate example should be consistent with that record in medium, dimensions, palette, and edition size. Anything that contradicts the known release specifications is an immediate red flag.
- Signature and numbering. The print is signed and numbered. The character of Fairey's signature, the format of the numbering, and their placement are all part of the evidentiary picture. Numbering outside the edition of 450, or a signature that departs from known examples, warrants scrutiny.
- Provenance. A credible chain of ownership — where the print came from, who has handled it, documentation from a reputable source — carries real weight in a market with no central authenticator. In the absence of Pest Control, provenance does much of the work that a certificate would do elsewhere.
Because these signals must be read together, and because the counterfeit market for Fairey is active, buyers should treat authentication as due diligence rather than a formality. Gauntlet Gallery maintains a dedicated guide to the specific tells and traps for this artist: see How to Spot a Fake Shepard Fairey before committing to any purchase. When there is no single authority to appeal to, the discipline of verification falls to the collector — and that discipline is the price of admission to a market this rewarding.
The Full Cycle
We have arrived, with the boy, at the end. It is worth standing back and seeing the whole shape of what Fairey and Rockoff built.
Five screenprints, one palette of red and cream and black, one photographer's witness underneath every frame, one recurring emblem of peace threading through them all until it fuses with the halo in the final image. The cycle moves from the grinning soldier hung with ammunition and a peace pendant, to the young woman with her rifle and flower, to the ornament-drenched machine-gunner, to the defiant older boy, and finally to the frightened younger boy with his hand at his mouth. It moves from adults who might be imagined as agents to children who cannot be. It moves from the catharsis of 2008 into the unfinished, hope-fatigued reality of June 2009, when the wars the series indicted had not stopped and a country that voted for change was learning the limits of a poster. And it moves from dualities held at arm's length toward a duality collapsed into a single small body, where the emblem of peace and the machinery of glory become the same handmade lines.
Does the series reconcile humanity's duality? No. That is the honest answer, and it is the finale's answer. The peace symbol woven into the sunburst does not heal the contradiction; it exposes it, showing how even the plea for peace can be absorbed into the iconography that sends children to war. The frightened child under the false halo is not a resolution. He is a refusal — a refusal to pretend that the two halves of human nature can be made to agree, and a refusal to look away from the smallest person paying the price of their disagreement. The cycle ends not with an answer but with recognition: this is a child, he is afraid, the glory around him is a lie, and he is one of us. If HOPE was Fairey's image of what we might become, Duality of Humanity 5 is his image of what we keep doing to each other in the meantime. The two belong to the same artist, made in the same years, and the tension between them is the truest thing about the work.
Explore each print in the cycle:
- Duality of Humanity 1 — the grinning soldier hung with ammunition and a peace pendant.
- Duality of Humanity 2 — the young woman with a rifle and a flower.
- Duality of Humanity 3 — the ornament-drenched machine-gunner.
- Duality of Humanity 4 — the defiant older boy with an M16.
- Duality of Humanity 5 — the frightened younger boy beneath the radiant halo. The finale.
To go deeper into the artist's market and catalogue, consult the Fairey Index, the Price Guide, the Buyer's Guide, and How to Spot a Fake Shepard Fairey. When you are ready to bring one home, browse available works in the Shepard Fairey collection. The cycle is complete. The question it leaves open is the one it always meant to.
