Unsigned impression 11 of 1,000, numbered in black ink verso; published by Pictures on Walls, London, with its blindstamp. A separate gold edition of 112 signed impressions was issued in 2007, alongside signed Formica editions of 20 in silver and 23 in gold, and 20 signed gold artist’s proofs.

Created in 2006, Flags (Silver) belongs to a period in which Banksy increasingly adapted the imagery and immediacy of his street practice for editioned works. The silver version was released in connection with the 2006 Santa’s Ghetto exhibition and is executed in black upon reflective Chromolux paper.

A group of hooded children and adolescents crowd upon the remains of a burnt-out car, working together to raise the American flag. Their bodies form a strong ascending diagonal, while the flagpole cuts across the composition towards the upper right. The metallic support changes according to the surrounding light, giving the otherwise austere image an unstable, almost cinematic luminosity.

The arrangement closely reinterprets Joe Rosenthal’s celebrated 1945 photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, in which six United States Marines raise the Stars and Stripes on Mount Suribachi. Banksy preserves the original image’s recognisable structure but replaces the servicemen and battlefield with young civilians and an urban wreck. This substitution unsettles the photograph’s associations with military victory, allowing the gesture to suggest solidarity and defiance while drawing attention to social exclusion and neglect.

Young people recur throughout Banksy’s work as figures through whom vulnerability, resistance and the consequences of adult authority may be examined. By setting an emblem of collective triumph against the material evidence of urban destruction, Flags (Silver) transforms a familiar historical image into an ambiguous reflection upon patriotism, inequality and participation in national narratives.