Photographs of Child Victims in Propaganda Posters of the Spanish Civil War

Imogen Bloomfield

doi:10.3828/mlo.v0i0.178

Abstract

This article examines propaganda posters from the Spanish Civil War that used photographs of child victims in an attempt to galvanise support for the Republican war effort. Rather than discus the efficacy of these posters as persuasive tools, this analysis focuses on their suitability to support propagandistic narratives of the Civil War, which would form and support ‘usable pasts’ for collectives – understandings of the past that serve a function in the present – such as identity claims, or the basis of demands for justice. In this instance the photographic discourses of these posters supported broader narratives of the Civil War. The use of child subjects afforded narrative flexibility to the photographs employed in these posters, and this was combined with the supposed veracity of the photographic medium, and the ingrained norms of familial photography – that taken of and by family members – to construct narratives with propagandistic value. Please note: This article contains graphic images of child death.

Highlights

Regarding War To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may – in ways we might prefer not to imagine – be linked to their suffering [...] is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark. (Sontag 91–92)
Why create and publish such images? And if horrific, disturbing images of conflict and suffering provoke only sympathy and an initial spark for reflection, why are they reproduced unendingly in news media, posters, cinema, television, and online? Many of the photographs that emerged from the Spanish Civil War remain arresting, disturbing, and emotive today, in spite of fears of the normalisation of atrocity photography in the modern era
Bloomfield: Photographs of Child Victims in Propaganda Posters of the Spanish Civil War power of photographs, the potential narrative breadth afforded by anonymous child subjects, and the familial relationships of ‘looking’ combine in these posters to construct narratives of war that harness the universal horror of child deaths to galvanise the wartime population to support Republican war efforts

Summary

Introduction

Regarding War To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may – in ways we might prefer not to imagine – be linked to their suffering [...] is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark. (Sontag 91–92). The use of atrocity photography in Spanish propaganda posters is part of a much larger cultural canon of public images of war, and of child victims.

Results

Conclusion