Exhibit 1.4

Stock Photography Review

From USBank.com

This compelling, though not particularly bold, entry comes courtesy of the banking industry which is to stock photography what the New Yorker is to line drawings, producing nearly 85% of the world's output. It's as if long ago some destined-to-be retail banking whiz snuck into his father's office, jimmied open the tantalizingly locked desk drawer, discovered a treasure of average looking people smiling back at him, and thought, "This must be sex."

Well, it's not, but that didn't stop whoever this was from plastering these pictures over every brochure, direct mailer, and website the banking industry produces. Which is good because it keeps my Louvre of Bland here running, but bad because with bank branches continuing to open at an alarm rate, we'll only be seeing more of it in the future.

This particular piece deftly manages the hard dichotomy of good stock photography: universality and anonymity. Notice the age of the woman--which can best be described as menopausal--falls between any easy classification, landing somewhere between mother and grandmother on the Child-Daughter-Young Independent Woman-Mother-Grandmother-Ruth Bader Ginsburg scale of female age. Is this woman Mom? Grandma? Me? It's the question your mind asks subconsciously, and the piece works because the answer is, of course, all of them. Ergo universality. The anonymity--that difficult quality that allows us not just to recognize the woman but to become her--is subtle. The blurred background of the piece nicely accomplishes a bit of abstract impressionism, letting us paint our own canvas behind her. Is that blob a sky scraper or a silo, a Wal-Mart or a yoga studio? It's the most interesting choice the artist made simply because most stock photography either plays in loose space (parks, fields, etc.) or tight space (kitchens, board rooms, etc.), if not eliminating the illusion of space all together by disembodying a head and painting color over the background. These Max Headroom like personae seem bizarrely natural on first glance and bizarrely unnatural on second. That line is skirted nicely here. Everything looks fairly standard until an observer notices this woman lives in a Morisot painting.

The other thing to note is the nice use of color, with the blue of the shirt fading into the bank's signature dark blue at the base with both the color of the shirt and the bar stopping at approximately the same place on the canvas. This picture was almost certainly not taken specifically for this client, so to be able to find such an easy match is fortuitous. Clothes ruin more stock photography than they help--hence disembodied heads again--and it isn't often to find the right clothes, with the right background, with the right face.

Speaking of, the woman's look strikes the right note of checking account satisfaction but cannot produce the softness the proposition seems to want. She looks like she knows a secret, an undesirable in the small-print world of banking.

Secrets this woman may know:

• What time Murphy Brown reruns are on
• Who farted
• The ending of the movie Phenomenon (Ed. note: He dies)
• What you do when alone at night
• Which margarine really is right for her lifestyle
• When the muffins are done

Still, she is a confident, successful-woman who should be proud to appear in this effective if not a little middling work.