ePoster Gallery 2/2023

An urgent appeal to the public

Using posters to attract the attention of passers-by to social issues is a particular challenge in a commercial advertising setting. Behind this selection stand committed designers – and a handful of commercial enterprises. The posters feature a broad range of objectives, visual rhetoric and argumentation strategies.

The communication of social messages in poster format often proves to be a balancing act between the dangers of minimisation, trivialisation, aestheticisation, shock and intellectual illegibility. That also reflects the way in which observers receive the message. As such, the posters presented here challenge us to reflect on our own habits of vision and thought, and to engage with new images.

In a brief interview, Nico Lazúla, archivist at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, discusses the portrayal of social issues in posters.

You can find the interview here

When did social appeals through the medium of the poster become established?

Essentially, political and social posters are a product of the First World War. In the subsequent years, up to the world financial crisis of 1929, the poster was recognised as the perfect medium to put young, malleable nations on a shared course in working and private life.
Certainly by the 1980s, with knowledge about forest decline and Chernobyl, unstoppable globalisation, trans-national ‘development cooperation’, the first climate conferences, etc., the questions, concerns and need for action present in political thinking also appeared in the medium of the poster. Slogans like ‘Save the trees’, ‘Make peace without weapons’ and ‘Nuclear power? No thanks’ became embedded in public consciousness. Rhetorical appeals are produced and used by both state and non-state actors.

Which posters in the selection use subversive strategies?

The Foundation against racism and antisemitism took a different approach in its campaign ‘What do Thai women do when it gets dark?’ The posters, with their play of question-and-answer in a comic style, are so striking that the observer can’t help smiling. The text and image planes pick up on established codes and subversively modify them.

Another example:
People generally don’t confuse advertising promises with reality. But political and social appeals explicitly strive to establish a reference to reality. The extent of this unspoken demarcation is best illustrated by the cases where this convention is shattered.
The most prominent example in this context is the advertising campaign that Oliviero Toscani developed for Benetton, which attracted attention worldwide. The controversy showed that the bold display of images of refugees, racism, the death penalty and so on violates this demarcation. Images that are business as usual in the evening news trigger an entirely unexpected confrontation in an advertising context, creating a visual shock and leading viewers to rethink their own attitudes.