Man Gets His Photo on PostSecret… With Someone Elses’ Secret

Allow us to explain:

• In 2005, Frank Warren began PostSecret, an art project of sorts where he encourages people to anonymously send him postcards with their own true secrets on them, so he can show them to the world.  It has been going strong ever since, with a weekly updated blog and five published books.

• In 2006, Luke Pebler put some pictures up on his Flickr, including this one.

• Last week, a new secret went up with the weekly batch on Postsecret.com, seen above (don’t bother looking for it on the website after October 16th, PostSecret has no archive).

Result?

Luke Pebler is deluged with missives from friends and family.

Over the next couple days I received many messages from friends and family, all ZOMGing over my appearance. The reactions broke cleanly into two camps — about half thought it was hilarious and assumed that I or someone close to me had submitted it as a goof; the other half were convinced that a stranger had used the photo, and found that bizarre and slightly creepy. My wife, a media scholar, immediately pointed out that I was a “creator” whose work has been “poached and reinterpreted.”

Dismissing any rights claims over the image, Pebler confesses that he’d love to meet the person who found his picture and chose it for their secret, although he knows that goes against the central tenets of the PostSecret project.  He also would like everyone to know that the idea that “I faked Broncos fandom (Preposterous!) in order to impress my (NFL-agnostic) wife,” is quite false.

(via BoingBoing.)