Ever since she was 23, people have been using Ann Kirsten Kennis’s image to sell their products. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, she appeared in magazine advertisements, catalogue pages, and television commercials for a long list of recognizable brands, among them L’Oréal, Revlon, Fabergé, Parliament, Cuervo, Jordache, and Vaseline. She did looker ads and lingerie ads and bathing-suit ads too. Her picture was even on the cover of a romantic novel.

She liked seeing her face in public. For a model, those images meant money in the bank.

But last winter, when Kennis learned that an old Polaroid picture of herself was being used to promote the No. 1 album in the country, she was anything but pleased, she says. Kennis had never heard of the band, Vampire Weekend, and had no idea how her image had made its way onto the cover of the group’s new album, Contra. Nor had she heard of Tod Brody, the photographer who claims to have taken the photo.

The album cover in dispute.

Kennis’s 13-year-old daughter, Alex, made the discovery last January, just after the album’s release. Kennis, 52, says she walked through the door of her family’s three-story house in Fairfield, Connecticut, to find Alex at the kitchen table, staring intently at the screen of her MacBook Pro. “Mom, come here, come here!” she said.

Kennis leaned over her daughter’s shoulder and examined the Barnes & Noble banner ad, which featured a Polaroid of a striking young blonde in a Polo shirt with a popped collar. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s strange. That’s me, many years ago,’” says Kennis, who was momentarily stunned by the sight of all that beautiful hair. Three weeks earlier she had completed chemotherapy for breast cancer, and her hair was just starting to grow back.

Kennis might have chosen to ignore the whole thing, if only that had been an option. Parking her car on Columbus Avenue, in Manhattan, she saw a poster of the album cover pasted to a storefront’s construction scaffolding; flipping through The New York Times, she saw a picture of the band using her photo as a giant concert backdrop; walking into the Gap, she heard Vampire Weekend playing over the speakers. Friends said they’d seen the cover in Montreal and even Finland.

At first, Kennis found the attention flattering—especially since Alex was having fun with it. (Alex set her phone to play Vampire Weekend’s “Horchata” and flash the album cover when Ann called.) But the more she thought about it, the angrier she became. “It felt like someone was exploiting me,” Kennis says. “Who do these people think they are that they can just take my picture from god only knows where and plaster it everywhere?”