We are so impregnated now in technologically sophisticated persuasion – More than a million memes Of all kinds shared every day on Instagram only – that the visualization of unpleasant and sometimes bizarre propaganda of previous times can cause a surprise. Who would have thought that? This is precisely what people of 50 will therefore say about the digital swill that we are moving so easily today. Promise.
For the moment, we can only predict this speculative future by looking back. Propagandopolis: a century of propaganda from around the worldA selection of visual persuasions of the globe from the beginning of the 20th century to now, is a travel account of the past of disinformation. Shot down by Bradley Davies of online resource And the reinforcement shop of the same name, each page of this little colorful manual of lies fascinates at the same time as he educates – historical movements that we may have forgotten or never known in the first place, and by extension of our own credulity to attractive but biased images.
Organized in alphabetical order by the country, starting with Afghanistan and ending with Zimbabwe, the variously beautiful, shocking, consternating or picturesque images are contextualized with capsule stories of their precipitating circumstances. We learn that one of the most familiar propaganda posters in this collection, the American Icon of World War II “Loose Lips could flow from ships”, was designed by Seymour Rinaldo Goff, head of the Art Department of Giant Distilling Seagram's, who was then able to take advantage of his unique marketing range to help the broadcast. In another example, an Israeli poster from 1950 shows an Arab soldier without a face behind a threatening representation of Israel while ships were dragging flow of new immigrants in the state, all under the slogan “Growth against seat!”; The image directly informs current events – it was produced by the Mapai party, which held power for decades after winning the first elections of Israel the previous year, and its platform was national defense, demographic growth and the economy. In the brief text accompanying the image, the general context of the horrible conflict that rages in the region is succinctly transmitted.
The most cruel and beneficial regimes are also responsible for some of the most lovely images. A 1972 poster of the USSR, its conception of a nod to Rodchenko and the national aesthetics, shows a worker raising a muscular fist against a member of Ku Klux Klan, with the legend “No to racism!” Two representations of the 1940s glorifying the fascist rule of Francisco Franco are misleadingly succulent – the draped dictator of a long Spanish flag absurdly on a background of Rowling storm clouds; A stylized death straddling a globe consumed by ardent conflicts, except for peaceful Spain – while Iraq’s 1999 painting imagining Saddam Hussein in a Mesopotamian tank brandishing a bow and an arrow while missiles and war planes fill the sky are both clumsy and magnificent, as well as a warning on the disastrous cops that are cultures so often adapted from personality. (It turns out that a population will only tolerate absolutism so long when it ends with savagery for themselves as well as their enemies; saddamism was put to death with its charismatic creator in 2006.)
The inclusion of welcome from the work of collectives such as the social justice of San Francisco Collective Graphics FireworksThe feminist Heresiesand EMORY DouglasThe work of the name of Black Panther Party shows that American design is sensitive to a long international history of graphics in service to promote social issues, which are the basis of many other examples of book propaganda, regardless of the era or the location. It is surprising to see how many problems solved during more than a century of murals, political caricatures, leaflets and posters are still relevant at this time. A single example is the graphic of the heresies of 1981, in a retro style of the 1950s, in which a woman plants another on the traditionally beautiful man in the foreground: “Caution, darling, he is anti-lash.”
Robert Peckham, historian and author of Fear: an alternative story of the worldprovides the informative introduction to visual propaganda, “fear, truth and spectacular history of propaganda”. He traces the beginning of the genre to the development of mobile types and the use of Martin Luther to produce his Pilot (“Flying writings”) Pamphlets. Later, during the French Revolution, a variety of visual signals such as the wearing of tricolor scar and the cotton pants of the working class were deployed to indicate and apply the affiliation of the group. The First World War added fuel to the propaganda engine as a consolidated and official means of achieving state objectives: “In 1917, President Wilson had set up a public information committee (ICC) with a discount to influence public opinion in the support of war through the distribution of brochures, posts, radio programs, films and public conferences.” Propaganda had left for races.
As Peckham reminds us, art is also in the end a tool to influence opinion and fomental action; It “exists in an ambiguous space between propaganda and trade”. There will never be the end of image manipulation. All we can do is understand your past in the hope of being able to read your future when it happens.
Propagandopolis: a century of propaganda from around the world By Bradley Davies (2024) is published by Fuel and is available online and in bookstores.
