University of CambridgeFaculty of Modern and Medieval Languages

Tripos Part II 2011

Year Abroad Project (Dissertation)

‘Una estética del poder’: Photographic construction, propaganda and ideology during the Spanish Civil War

Candidate Number:

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‘Una estética del poder’: Photographic construction, propaganda and ideology during the Spanish Civil War

During the course of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, war and photography became inseparable; the fratricidal conflict that was the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) is considered as the first war to be witnessed in a modern sense with a corps of professional photographers covering the front line as well as those towns and cities under bombardment. Claud Cockburn, journalist for the Daily Worker, commented that it was ‘the most photogenic war anyone has ever seen’ (Stradling 2008: 148). These photographs constituted the most important source of information on the Spanish conflict and so were published in newspapers and magazines in Europe and beyond and were used to great effect in propaganda by both Nationalists and Republicans1. This dissertation will focus on propaganda produced by those who shared the ideology of the Republican side as this side of the conflict attracted the input of several prominent and talented photographers and artists. They include Robert Capa, Kati Horna, Gerda Taro, Josep Renau and John Heartfield. War propaganda comes in many different forms: newsreels, music, leaflets, public demonstrations among many others. We might consider whether the various media of propaganda function as an integral part of the message the propaganda seeks to convey or whether it is simply a means of expression that is aesthetically pleasing to the public it is aimed at. This dissertation will work on the assumption that the latter view is not the case and that the image environment of a photograph used in propaganda is vital in communicating that said message. For the purposes of this dissertation, the image environment of a photograph is defined as the context in which a photograph is published (place, date and the type of publication it appears in), the aesthetic techniques it is combined with (different colours, style of depiction, other images) and, in many cases, the use of text (slogans and captions). Also to be explored is the statement that a photograph and the image environment in which it becomes a part of only forms successful propaganda when it presents ‘biased communication’ (Dovring 1959: 12) as incontrovertible truth or reality. Only one element of an objective truth may be put forward, thus, propaganda is inextricably bound up with the issue of revelation and concealment. We will see how some propagandists preferred using horrific images of the conflict in order to communicate their message and how others favoured concealment of some of the more terrible aspects of the reality of the war to create a romanticised, attractive ideological standpoint that also boosted morale amongst those in Spain, and in Europe too, who shared their ideas. Finally, the issue of the ‘estética del poder’ (Fundación Pablo Iglesias 2004: 28) possessed by propaganda in influencing and controlling the ideology of certain groups during the civil war, particularly through shock tactics, will be examined in relation to the image environment of selected photographs. This examination will also seek to answer the question, ‘If propaganda is powerful is it also empowering?’

I. The surreal, the symbolic and the sordid

Photographs come in many guises: as fine art, photo journalism and as evidence in legal proceedings among many others but what is fundamental in every photograph is that they are all a ‘means of testing, confirming and constructing a total view of reality’ (Berger 1971: 182). On one hand, photographs are an enduring fragment of a past reality and present the viewer with an insight into the way things were: even if the image distorts this view of the past, one can always be certain that something exists, or used to exist, which is similar to what is seen in the photograph. On the other hand, however, it has been suggested that:

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Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision (Sontag 1979: 52)

She goes on to posit that what makes a photograph in itself surreal is the ‘distance imposed, and bridged […], the social distance and the distance in time’ (1979: 58). This aspect of Surrealism plays with our concrete notions of time and space: what we take to be true and certain in our everyday lives. One of the aims of the Surrealist movement was to enhance the strangeness in the everyday so that the familiar is rendered unfamiliar and peculiar. It is like seeing a room in one’s home inverted in a mirror; the furniture is in its correct position and the windows open out onto the same view but we cannot shake the feeling that what we see is new, strange and different.

Photographers documenting the devastation of the Civil War on Spain’s infrastructure and citizens produced images that portrayed both the horrifically sordid and the appallingly absurd aspects of this fratricidal war, in a dichotomic amalgam of the real and the surreal. Among them, were images of bombed buildings with no façades that are astonishingly Surreal. These photographs of the damage inflicted on the urban face of Spain during a time of relentless bombardments were endlessly featured in the foreign press, particularly in France and Britain, and seemed to posses a certain fascinating quality. Figure 1 is a Robert Capa photograph of a bombed apartment in which framed images remain hanging on the wall and a vase of flowers sits undisturbed on a plant stand. The only ostensible thing wrong with this image, alerting the viewer as to why Capa recorded it, is that the door has been blown in and the rooms below and above the one the camera focuses on are visible; the ceilings and floors are as if sliced away by a knife. By destroying huge parts of this building and sparing small items within it, the bomb creates a Surrealist landscape and the viewer recognizes the surreal contradiction that:

walls now acted as windows, floors as window ledges, […] that doorways led to nowhere and that roofs provided no protection from the elements (Brothers 1997: 116)

The interior of this apartment has been opened up to the outside world, turning a private space into an anonymous public one in what Brothers calls ‘an eruption of the absurd into daily urban life’ (1997: 115). The privacy of the individual has been lost in the overwhelming technological power of the bomb. This absurd loss of privacy is demonstrated by the presence of the prying eye of the camera and, through it, our prying eyes as viewers.

Figure 2, a photograph taken in Lérida by Kati Horna, shows the façade of a bombed apartment block. The wallpapered walls of people’s homes have been exposed by the blast and, on the top floor, what appears to be a framed painting or photograph remains hanging on the wall, intact: the door to its left would now open only onto a void where a room used to be. Even the trees, all apart from one to the left of the photograph, have been destroyed and point bare limbs towards the sky, as if they were pointing the finger at the bombers responsible. On the right hand side of the photograph a standard lamp and bookshelves can just be discerned in one of the rooms and in others there are more pieces of furniture that have been displaced from their usual positions by the force of the blast. In the street below the bombed building, however, a woman sifts through a pile of household items – mattresses, chests and various items of clothing – perhaps searching for the precious objects she has lost. Objects appear displaced, resulting in surreal and illogical juxtapositions that are accepted as a consequence of war in an iconographical illustration of the devastation that describes but does not explain why it has happened. The camera captures the tragic realism of the situation for the inhabitants of these buildings but in a surrealistic and it records the reality of what is no longer. Through its depiction of devastation to buildings, reminds the viewer of something that used to exist but exists no longer. This is the defining feature of a photograph: it is a tangible reminder of the past that prevents it from being lost completely. This is

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why people take photographs of their loved ones and happy events: to remember them when they have been erased by time or distance.

Photographs are both a tangible object but are also symbolic of a past reality and, like paintings and other works of art, they can contain symbols for the viewer to decode. During the Spanish Civil War photographers took pains to present soldiers as being heroic and brave as well as being conscious of conforming to tacit rules of taste. Brothers states that ‘news photographs are used almost exclusively as evidence’ (1997: 161), however, photojournalists documented injury and death inflicted on soldiers and civilians alike and their images were used in the same way as those of war-torn buildings in foreign publications; mainly to provoke sympathy for Spain in Europe. Pages in British and French publications reporting on the Spanish Civil War were largely sanitized due to some images being judged by editors as being too shocking for public consumption. Thus, the representation of war injury and death was euphemistic in tone and symbols were used to depict death. In an image published by Reynolds’ News in 1936 a single soldier is seen approaching the photographer carrying four rifles. The caption is vital for our understanding of the image. Titles ‘After the Battle’ it reads: Bringing home his old comrades’ rifles on the outskirts of Madrid. Each rifle symbolizes a dead soldier.

There also appeared photographs such as Figure 3 by Kati Horna in which Horna portrays an injured soldier on a stretcher, covered over completely with a blanket, acting as a barrier between our eyes and the truth of the extent of his injury. The soldier’s dishevelled hair and facial expression inform us that he is wounded but, essentially, he functions as a symbol of bravery in the face of suffering. Photographs such as this one provoked sympathy in the public who saw them but did not cross the line between taste and the desire to shock. Figure 4 by Robert Capa is of a dying soldier dictating his last words to a comrade. There is some blood on the bandage on the soldier’s head but the blood and the bandage are merely symbols of the man’s true suffering and the viewer does not see the full extent of his wounds. Capa keeps his distance from the two men, not wanting to intrude into the scene and so the viewer feels removed from the photograph as though it were not real. This photograph was featured in the British magazine Picture Post on 3 December 1938 with the caption:

But for this man it is the end: A dying man gives his last letter. He will never go home again. He will never write any letters after this one. He speaks a few brokensentences. A comrade listens, tries to catch his meaning, jots the words down. Later he will contrive to send them home. Another brave man has met his end.

The caption is so awash with pathos that it does not let the photograph speak for itself and manages to draw the reader’s attention away from the injury itself, which becomes a secondary theme. Unashamedly propagandistic, the caption only gives one interpretation of the image it is attached to. Godard and Gorin assert that all images are ‘physically mute’ (Sontag 1979: 108) and only talk through the mouth of the caption beneath them but in images of the Civil War pictures speak louder than words; the words only strengthen the message to render it a more powerful piece of propaganda.

Naked reality is rarely pleasant but some publications, particularly French ones such as Regards, were prepared to publish images of the horrors of war, in a manner that can only be described as sordid. The images themselves seem to ‘express disgust at their own sordidness’

(Berger 1971: 184) and the photographers and/or the newspaper editors who organized the layout of this page subscribed unconsciously or not to the Surrealist idea of shocking society by whatever means possible by heightening the effect of the unpalatable photographs with the image environment they created. The 12 November 1936 issue of the British publication the Daily Worker undoubtedly featured some of the most dreadful photographs of the war and felt the need to justify why they printed them (Figure 5). The images are identification photographs of children killed in the raid on the town of Getafe, outside Madrid, on 30 October 1936. They formed part of a dossier of twenty images given by an anonymous source to Mikhail Koltsov, the powerful

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representative of Stalin and senior editor of Pravda, a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union, on 4 November 1936, just as the Nationalists were occupying Getafe. In his diary he described them as ‘large and beautiful photographs of children who appear like dolls’ (Koltsov 1978: 179). The images in this report all come from the Koltsov dossier. The largest of them, in the most prominent position on the page, is of a little girl whose eyes and mouth are open, her matted hair fanning out behind her head. Here there is no symbolism to represent death and no euphemism to soften the blow to the viewer’s senses. Blood stains their faces, their clothing and the ground and shrapnel wounds criss-cross their faces. The identification labels on their chests a sign of their new status as objects to be catalogued to be utilized as propaganda and evidence of Nationalist barbarity. All of the photographs of the children are taken at close-range and are cropped so that their faces and identification labels are impossible to ignore. There is also a photograph of the corpses lined up in a morgue covered in sheets but this image has nowhere near the same power as that of the photographs of the individual children because we cannot see the faces of the victims. Being able to look into the faces, even the eyes, of the dead makes it impossible for the viewer not to be moved by the atrocity of the bombing and makes it more likely that the propaganda has the desired effect of turning the minds of the newspaper’s readership against Fascism. The number of images of separate victims also renders this page sordid; had there been just one image of one child the impact would not have been so great. The editor goes even further in that he juxtaposes these images with a photograph of an active and happy English child playing in the sun and the caption ‘Twelve days ago THEY played as SHE does’, the capitalisation of ‘they’ and ‘she’ underlining the contrast. Roland Barthes has discussed what he calls a photograph’s punctum

(2000: 27) (the Latin term for a ‘sting’, ‘speck’ or ‘cut’), or that which is striking and poignant to the viewer. All photographs of the Spanish Civil War have a punctum because of their pathos but none more so than Figure 4 which possesses a tragic realism that arrests our gaze and haunts us. Brothers suggests that often the aesthetic quality of photographs ‘neutralizes their power to disturb and makes the unpalatable tolerable’ (Brothers 1997: 170) but only to a limit: when the viewer really looks at the image, no amount of aesthetically pleasing composition or cropping can detract from the sordidness of what was captured on film. It is the punctum of these photographs that lends them their power and an enduring quality so that the same intense reaction is felt in today’s observer as it was by contemporary observers. It is the figurative, aesthetic power of these images that empowered the editor of the Daily Worker, and thus the Republican cause in general, in the battle for minds and hearts that ruled the conflict.

Unquestionably the most famous and enduring photograph of the Spanish Civil War is Robert Capa’s Death of a Republican Soldier (Figure 5). Considerable controversy has surrounded this image since its first publication in Vu on 23 September 1936 because, at its heart, are questions concerning the ‘nature an reliability of photographic truth’ (Brothers 1997: 179). Neither caption nor negative have been preserved for this photograph and many critics have suggested that it was staged. The blurriness of the photograph, the shadow above the crown of the soldier’s head and the awkward angles of this body suggest that a bullet has reached its target just as Capa took the photograph, conferring great power to the image as representative of the nature of death in war and for the Spanish Civil War in particular. However, all this evidence amounts to nothing when on considers that there are no other soldiers captured in the photograph and in the background is the cropped grass of a hillside with more hills in the distance suggesting, according to Brothers, ‘age-old poetic conceits in which reaped harvests were a metaphor for death’ (Brothers 1997: 179). The dark shadow could simply be the tassel of the soldier’s cap blurred in motion. Moreover, Vu also published alongside this image a second photograph (Figure 6) in which another militiaman meets his death. Given that in the 1930s photographs capturing the exact moment of a bullet reaching its target were rare, without the technologically sophisticated equipment at the disposal of war photographers today, it is improbable that Capa was able to capture the exact moment of death of two different soldiers. Brothers is of the opinion that Capa staged the photograph using two soldiers and a camera mounted on a tripod, particularly as the background and the light falling on it appear almost identical in both images. Life use the first

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image as part of an article on the causes of the war and the death and destruction caused by it in turn (Figure 7). This piece of propaganda aims to provoke a mixture of sympathy and disgust in American citizens using emotive language to describe the extent of the destruction and the alleged behaviour of the Spanish ruling classes. The author sympathizes with the Republican cause, describing the ‘ancient’ cities of Spain as ‘shattered’ and by reviewing his or her opinion that the Republicans were ‘murderous scum.’ Instead, the ruling classes are given short shrift and condemned with a string of unflattering adjectives at the beginning of the second paragraph, including ‘irresponsible’, which is used in the previous paragraph to describe the Republicans as they were seen by U.S. citizens at the start of the war. Despite not being a true reflection of a past reality in that it does not show the actual death of a soldier, this image is nevertheless an archetypal symbol of death in war and a powerful piece of propaganda, particularly in combination with emotive text. No longer trustworthy evidence of an individual’s death, the photograph stands for the broader ideology of this era. This photograph stresses that a war death ‘heroic, and tragic, and that the individual counted and that his death mattered’ (Brothers 1997: 183). Mostly, it incites pity in the viewer for Spain’s plight and is, in essence, an image with true pathos.

All photographs of the Spanish Civil War, whether they are surreal, symbolic or sordid, have a special relationship with reality but it is the sordid that represented reality in such a shocking way that grotesque images had more power over the thoughts and emotions of the Spanish public and people in other European countries in the form of propaganda. On the other hand, Sontag has argued recently that:

The vast photographic catalogue of misery and injustice throughout the world has given everyone a certain familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible seem more ordinary – making it appear familiar (1979: 20-21)

After repeated exposure to gruesome photographs we have lost our sense of moral outrage in the face of the horrific realities of war, starvation and natural disaster: the images have become banal and remote, less real: in some cases, they seem one dimensional. During the first half of the twentieth century, however, the technique of photomontage was developed in Europe by artists who, through their art, ‘committed their imagination to the service of a mass political struggle’

(Berger 1971: 184). The way in which different types of image were taken from various sources and combined forced people to truly look at photographs, tiny pieces of reality, and to see through them, the true horrors of war and Fascism in Europe.

II. ‘Un provocador desmembramiento de la realidad’ (Ades 2002: 12-13)

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Photomontage was first used in the 1930s by the Berlin Dadaists (Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann and John Heartfield among others) and was used increasingly by all political factions in Europe and Russia in the decades preceding the Second World War. It is particularly practicable in the form of commercial publicity but, more importantly, was used on both Nationalist and Republican propaganda posters during the Spanish Civil War. Being ‘ideal para expresar la dialéctica marxista’ (Ades 2002: 41), the technique is particularly associated with the political left. Photomontage is a form of political satire and a didactic weapon of propaganda. Through its use of fragmentation, combination and symbolism, it uses realist elements in an often surreal combination to convey a message about war and political struggle almost as powerfully as shocking documentary photographs of the dead and injured.

The Dadaists themselves were revolutionary, being the first artists to use the photograph as material with which to create new art, tearing from the ‘caos de la guerra y de la revolución una imagen completamente nueva’ (Ades 2002: 24). They took distinct photographs, or parts of them, and arranged them with newspaper and magazine cuttings as well as other artwork and text, coining the term ‘photomontage’ to describe the resultant collages. When combined in these collages, the separate elements took on the role of symbols because, for the viewer, it is clear that they did not originally belong together on the page; in perceiving this, the viewer is forced to ask themselves why these particular items have been selected and what they convey in combination. Thus, the various fragments of a photomontage constitute an image environment that informs each separate image. The image environment also includes text, which was used as an aid to the viewer’s understanding of the propaganda, similar to the way in which, as we have already seen, captions gave an interpretation of photographs in European publications.

One of the most prolific and well-known photomonteurs of the twentieth century was John Heartfield. He began his career in the Berlin Dada scene and principally produced photomontages commenting on the rise and reign of Fascism across Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly in Germany during the Second World War but also in Spain during its civil war. Louis Aragón, the French poet and Communist Party supporter, wrote that John Heartfield’s art “es un cuchillo que entra en todos los corazones” and juxtaposing image and image, or image and text, Heartfield made the public instantly aware of the sharp contrast between propaganda and truth; between the surreal and the real: this is achieved principally through symbolism. Figure 8 is a photomontage from a 1937 issue of the magazine VI (Volks Illustrierte or People’s Illustrated), the reincarnation of the German magazine AIZ (Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung or Workers’ Illustrated Paper) after its move to Prague in 1933, for which Heartfield produced 237 photomontages between 1930 and 1938. It is entitled ‘Baskenland’ or ‘Basque Country’ and was produced during the aftermath of the bombing of the Basque capital, Guernica, by German planes on 27 April 1937. Heartfield has placed a photograph of a disconsolate mother cradling her child in the foreground of the piece with another photograph of the damage inflicted on Guernica behind the two figures. The mother’s facial expression, the way in which the infant stares directly at the camera and the utter destruction of the building behind them incite feelings of pity and sympathy in the viewer. Heartfield has emphasized the consequences of the bombings – human grief and physical destruction – and, in doing so, conveys the message that the suffering caused to the citizens of Guernica cannot be mended as easily as the damage done to its infrastructure. It is for this reason that this photomontage is a successful piece of propaganda. Had an eyewitness photographed this mother and child standing outside of this bombed building with normal scale and perspective, the image would not have been as powerful nor would it have possessed as much pathos as it does in this form. Bertolt Brecht described as realist any artwork that helped the viewer grasp reality. Under this definition, then, this photomontage is realist because, through the techniques used, Heartfield made changes to images, (small, tangible pieces of the reality of the situation) to make it easier for the viewer to comprehend the full extent of the damage inflicted. However, ‘fragmentation is a commonplace of Surrealist art’

(Burke 2006: 88) and so Heartfield arranged the images in a surrealist manner to better convey a message about the reality of a situation. The scale and perspective of the two figures in front of the

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building are unusual and indicate to the viewer immediately that what they are looking at is a photomontage and not a photograph. It is precisely this surreal aspect that forces us to really look at the image and to understand its message.

Like the unsanitized images of the Civil War which showed the true horrors the damage inflicted by the conflict on soldiers and civilians alike, John Berger feels that in Heartfield’s best photomontages there is a ‘sense of everything having been soiled’ even though it is difficult to pinpoint exactly how or why.

The greyness, the very tonality of the photographic prints suggests it, as do thefolds of the grey clothes, the outline of the frozen gestures, the half-shadows on pale faces […] (Berger 1971: 184).

In ‘Baskenland’ it is the pathos of the two figures, the soft tonality of the greys that depict them in comparison with the harsh black and whites of the bombed building behind them. The photomontage seems sordid because the text at the foot of the photomontage, a contemporary report from the Times, emphasizes the terrible losses (as a result of the bombardments at Guernica, Durango, Bilbao, Amorebieta and Eibar, 2,000 civilians and 600 women and children were killed). The text in combination with the fragmented images is shocking and the viewer cannot help but be profoundly affected by what is depicted. Ades states that:

la fotografía, que mantiene una relación especial con la realidad, también es susceptible de ser manipulada para reorganizar o desorganizar la realidad (2002: 66).

She goes on to describes the new image created by this reorganization as ‘explosiva y caótica, un provocador desmembramiento de la realidad’ (Ades 2002: 12-13). Therefore, then or now, this photomontage, because of its almost three-dimensional quality, could never be regarded passively in the same way images of grief and destruction are sometimes viewed in newspapers and magazines today, in a culture in which we are bombarded by horrific images.

Many of Heartfield’s photomontages created a comic vision of society using traditional caricature and photography to comment on the underlying sinister aspects of the rule of Fascism in Germany, Russia and Spain. Heartfield declared in 1958, ‘I am for realism and as a party artist […] I am for socialist realism’ (Evans 1992: 29). Under this personal ideology Heartfield took fragments of images that did not reveal anything about the hidden mechanisms of society and arranged them to articulate something about that same society using political satire in a combative way. All of the separate elements of a photomontage work together to convey something about society but the viewer realizes that these elements did not originally belong together. Montage, then, stands for ‘the fragmentation of […] an everyday reality that has suddenly burst into the frame of experience’ (Teitelbaum 1992: 31). It is this dismembering of reality that renders the photograph itself visible: the viewer normally does not look at a photograph, instead what a photograph contains, however, photomontage points out the incongruity of the fragments that form part of the whole piece of artwork and they are no longer invisible but bold symbols instead. Barthes states that:

The photograph is never anything but an anticipation of “Look”, “See”, “Here it is”; it points a finger at certain vis-à-vis and cannot escape this pure deictic language (2000: 5).

The text on a photomontage spells out the propagandist message of the piece and the object in each fragment as well as the fragmentation itself points out the message in images: it is for this reason that photomontage is so successful as propaganda. We assign didactic possibilities to photography, assuming that photographs point to the truth because they are a supposed direct

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copy of the way events, people and objects appear in real life, and so it is a powerful way of getting people to take on a certain mindset or belief. Indeed, the slogan over the entrance to the John Heartfield room at the prestigious Film und Foto exhibition that opened in 1929 in Stuttgart was, “Use photography as a weapon!”. With the camera’s reputation for producing objective visual information, photomontage was an important weapon in the propaganda battle of the Spanish Civil War, particularly on the Republican side, for boosting the public’s morale, educating them on the events of war and inciting them to support the troops among other aims. During the war, the best way to convey these messages in the public arena of the streets of Spanish cities was on posters.

III. ‘Un grito pegado a la pared’ (Julián González 1993: 17)

In Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia he comments that on his arrival in Barcelona in late December 1936, ‘The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues’ (1938:__). Posters were an important cog in the propaganda machine during the war and it is estimated that between 1936 and 1938 some 2000 poster designs appeared in the streets of Spanish towns and cities (Aulich 2007: 130). Colourful and eye-catching posters were created and deployed by both sides and many of them used photographs, often in the form of photomontages, to sway public opinion, to boost moral, to educate the masses on health issues and the events of the war and to recruit volunteer soldiers. Their beauty as propaganda tools was that they were directed at ‘la totalidad de una colectividad’ and were difficult to ignore, being described as ‘un grito pegado a la pared’ (Julián González 1993: 17-18). Eminent artists such as the likes of Joan Miró, Josep Renau and Carles Fontseré volunteered their services as graphic designers and created posters without interference from the militias, political parties or trade unions who simply added their emblems and slogans before sending them to be printed (Aulich 2007: 139). It is these slogans (and the typeface they appear in) along with artwork and carefully chosen colour combinations that composed the image environment for any photographs or photomontage used on the posters. We will see that the thoughtfully orchestrated image environment for photographs on posters affected how the image came across to the public and the effect it on the its audience. It was during this period that photography was first utilized within the graphic propaganda field and it raised the medium to ‘a new height of emotive communication’ (Thomson 1977: 44). Poster artists gradually came to realize that more often than not photographs were more hard-hitting and visually powerful than drawings and sketches and so were more useful for their task. This is because of the realism of a photograph; the public could relate more adeptly with an image that portrayed reality more clearly. Ades suggests that a poster with photographs of starving people on it ‘causa una impresión mucho más honda que un cartel con dibujos de la misma gente hambrienta’ (2002: 72). Thus, it was posters, particularly those featuring photographs, that were indispensable to propagandists in their quest for influence and power over the collective. Furthermore, in the case of ‘carteles educativos’ this form of propaganda was empowering because they urged people to educate themselves by learning to read and listening to radio reports on the war, to protect themselves from sexually transmitted diseases and to donate blood to help hospitals caring for the wounded. In effect, these posters empowered the Spanish people because they encouraged ‘la retaguardia’ to take a more active role in several areas of the war.

The Ministerio de Propaganda was one of the most active institutions in the production of propaganda posters in Republican Spain and was created by the government of the socialist Francisco Largo Caballero 4 November 1936. With the aim of informing the world of the decimation of the town of Guernica by Nazi planes working for Franco on 26 April 1937 the Ministerio de Propaganda de Madrid published and distributed the famous poster ¿Qué haces tú para impedir esto? It was also produced for a British and French audience with the slogan in translation. Figure 9 is the version for the French public (Que fais-tu pour empêcher cela?). This emotive photomontage poster shows the terror-stricken face of a mother and her child with

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German planes flying over them and was pasted up in the streets of Madrid, Paris and London in a bid to foster support and solidarity for the Republican cause and to build up opposition to Fascism. The propaganda power of this poster lies in the fact that ‘la icongrafía mostraba a las personas más indefensas en una guerra: las mujeres y los niños’ (Ministerio de Cultura 1990: 42). It was common for the prototype of the ‘mujer-madre’ to be used by several Republican organizations on the posters they produced because an image of a woman with a child in her arms created ‘escenas llenas de patetismo y desolación’ useful in humanizing the victims of bombardments and the horrors of war (Colección J. Díaz Prósper y J. Roca Boix 1998: 34-35). In other words, this poster is powerful because it portrays the powerless in contrast to the military might of the Nazis working closely with Franco’s Nationalists. However, it is impossible to tell whether the photograph of the mother and child was posed or whether it is taken from contemporary photo reportage. We do not know whether the bombed building behind them was a architectural casualty of the bombing in Guernica or of another town. This makes it impossible to say whether this poster represents truthfully the past reality of the situation in Guernica. For all the viewer knows, these photographs have simply been placed together in this montage for the purposes of the construction of this poster. We can say for certain that the actual photomontage and the slogan, with its forceful rhetorical question, have been designed to kindle a feeling of pity and of shame in the viewer and to incite them to action of some kind. Whether the poster depicts the actual reality of the situation in Guernica becomes unimportant because it is close enough to the truth to be powerful enough to produce emotion in the viewer. This poster was found in a book and it is difficult for a modern-day viewer to imagine the original image environment of the poster in the streets of Madrid, London and Paris. Perhaps it was tacked up alongside other posters of a similar nature, which would have heightened the effect of this poster; it is impossible to know. In isolation, however, looking at the use of colour (black, white and red) we can say that the stark contrast of the black and white photographs with the slogan in vermilion red is clear and forceful. The capitalization of the slogan has the same effect. The composition of the images is so that the building and the planes loom threateningly over the two figures in the foreground and the important elements of the poster form a triangle, dragging the eye quickly from one image to another. In essence, the image environment of the individual photographs on this page combines with them to make this poster powerful. Sir Francis Bacon said that knowledge is power; this near truthful representation of the bombardment of Guernica and its consequences on the town and its people makes this poster empowering because it informs the viewer, permitting them to align themselves politically and then to act.

Figure 10 is a poster made by an anonymous artist on behalf of the Ministerio de Propaganda on which appears one of the photographs used in Figure 5, the report from the Daily Worker of 12 November 1936, examined above. This poster utilizes the shock tactic to convince the British, French and American publics of the potential danger to their own families in remaining indifferent to such atrocities and (above all) the necessity of supporting the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, thus opposing Fascism in Europe (Stradling 2008: 3). The Getafe story was much more widely publicized in ‘the democracies’ than in Spain and formed part of discrete propaganda aimed at public opinion in these countries. It was the first time that the citizens of Britain, France and America had been presented with images of civilian fatalities of the Spanish Civil War, not to mention those of children because in the first months of the conflict censorship had allowed European citizens to keep on in the ignorance of the true situation of the war to preserve morale. Today, most observers appreciate this poster as a visual prophecy of the aerial bombardment of the Second World War that would take place five years later. The image in question has been included as a fragment of a photomontage so that the little girl with her numbered identity tag (known as ‘Victim 4-21-35 by many commentators and identified later as María Santiago Robert) are superimposed onto the background of a clouded sky filled with German Junkers bombers flying in formation. The photomontage is accompanied by the strapline, ‘L’action “militaire” des rebelles: Ce que l’Europe tolère ou protège ce que vos enfants peuvent attendre’ (the English version is, ‘The “military” practice of the rebels: If you tolerate this your

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children will be next’). In effect, this photograph has been removed from its original image environment and has been placed into a new one, however, its purpose has not changed. In the original image environment of the newspaper report this photograph, along with others, was used in juxtaposition with a photograph of a happy English child playing in peace under which appears the following caption: She’s English. She plays in peace now. But fascist aggression, unchecked, carries its threat of death for our children too. The message is the same in both the contexts in which this photograph appears. On the propaganda poster, however, the image appears in isolation rather than surrounded by similar photographs of tiny cadavers. This perhaps softens the blow of the newspaper report in that the viewer is not bombarded by several terrible images but has chance to reel from the shock of this one image and then to process that shock in their own time. The photograph on the poster appears exactly as it does in the newspaper report but, due to the background of planes flying in formation, it appears that the photograph of the little girl is not as closely cropped and so this also slightly lessens the impact on the viewer. In addition, the newspaper report appeared in stark, formal black and white whereas on the poster the black and white image is placed on a green background. Different colours have innumerable connotations in various contexts and cultures all over the world and can effect how someone reads an image or piece of text when they appear in combination. The colour green occupies more space in the spectrum visible to the human eye than any other colour and so is the most easily distinguished colour by the eye. It could be suggested that the choice of green for this poster was to make it as visible as possible to its intended audience. In the context of the Spanish Civil War in which this poster appeared, green did not have attached to it any political meaning in that it did not represent any of the political parties involved in the conflict. Although, it is interesting that, as the message urges the British and French public to oppose Fascism, the background could easily have been Republican red to more closely ally it with the political left. Perhaps the artist felt that a red background would have been just too shocking given that the colour red often represents blood and, combined with the photograph of the little girl, could have repelled the viewer to the extent that they would not want to perceive and understand the message of the poster. Green is commonly known as a restful colour associated with nature and life. It often represents harmony and balance and, therefore, is a clever choice for this propaganda poster in that it softens the impact of this terribly sordid photograph just enough to make it palatable to the viewer but that it does not diminish the work of the shock tactic employed.

The same photos from the Koltsov dossier were also used on another poster created by an anonymous artist for the Ministerio de Propaganda (Figure 11) that combines photography with a potent slogan and painted artwork. In contrast with Figure 10, the artist is free in his or her use of a shocking Republican red for the background. The photographs on this background are presented in two rows of four photographs like in a catalogue. Vicious-looking black painted bombs hurtle down on them from the top left corner and the slogan, ‘¡Asesinos! ¿Quién al ver esto no empuña un fusil para aplastar al fascismo destructor?’ and below the photographs the caption, ‘Niños muertos en Madrid por las bombas facciosas.’ The aim of this poster was to galvanize volunteering in the Republican rearguard, or at least to combat shirking conscription (Stradling 2008: Plate 3). The punctuation is provocative and the rhetorical question in the slogan does not allow the observer to be passive; it makes them feel uncomfortable enough to do something in the same way that, earlier on, the famous poster from the First World War ‘Daddy. what did YOU do in the Great War?’ did. However, in a country where illiteracy was still prevalent, especially in rural areas and among women, the propagandist could not always rely on the public being able to read and understand his slogans so photographs on posters were particularly useful in conveying the message. Republican propagandists also had to ensure that any images used on posters that were to be distributed throughout Europe would allow foreigners to easily understand the predicament of Spain without necessarily understanding its circumstances. In this case, the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words is apt.

We have seen that the images of the victims of Getafe and Guernica used on the posters and newspaper reports examined above often used women and children as propaganda material. On

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the day that Getafe fell to the Nationalists (4 November 1936) the Italian delegate of the Non-Intervention Committee2, Count Grandi, berated the Republicans for portraying to the rest of Europe that:

If the aircraft of the Spanish Nationalists carry out war operations, it is straightaway said that the harmless women and children of democratic Spain are the only victims of such operations (Maisky 1966: 68).

Grandi exposed the concentration of the Republican propagandists on the suffering of women and children in aerial bombardments and highlights their sense of moral righteousness in the face of Nationalist barbarism. It was not just the Nationalists that carried out aerial bombardments, however; the Republicans were also guilty of this and other atrocities during the war. Furthermore, these images seem to represent the tragic reality of the war and its consequences on victims of aerial bombardments but from the end of 1936 newspapers in Britain began to gently warn readers that both sides in Spain were capable of lying as an ends to a mean; namely to boost their own morale, damage their enemy’s and to improve their image in the outside world. It has come to light in recent years that the children killed by aerial bombardment who were photographed in the morgue and used on the posters/newspaper reports analysed above were not in fact from Getafe as was widely publicized. Robert Stradling (2008: 236) has discovered that, without exception, every child in the Koltsov dossier was recorded as living at addresses in central Madrid and the various barrios immediately south of the Plaza Mayor. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that these children were evacuated to Getafe from Madrid but it is reasonable to say that there exists a possibility that they were not killed in Getafe on the day of the aerial bombardment. The bombing that took place in Getafe focused mainly on the Republican airbase situated there rather than the town itself. Thus, photographs (which, as we have seen, are considered as mirrors of past realities), in the case of the Koltsov dossier photographs, become part of a tableau of deceit fashioned for the purposes of propaganda. They cannot always be taken on face value and nor can their image environment.

Concluding remarks:

To this day the Spanish Civil War is a source of political energy and debate in Spain, with mass graves of victims still being excavated and only a recently budding desire to break the ‘pacto de silencio’ that surrounds the period. Spaniards are still deeply affected by the conflict and, therefore, it still wields power over their collective psyche, having not yet been relegated to history. Similarly, the images used in the propaganda of the period endure to the present day across Europe. Having depicted the consequences of the actions of those who possessed power on those who lacked it, it is still aesthetically powerful. At the time, the images that formed part of Republican propaganda also held sway on the hearts and minds of the Spanish, French, British and American public in that it influenced opinion and even encouraged volunteers to sign up to fight alongside the Spanish Republicans. Propaganda is artful because it is a weapon able to wield incredible power in warfare for all parties whilst twisting the truth of a matter without impeachment; concealing facts or portraying them as something other than what they really are. The photographs taken by foreign photographers and published in foreign newspapers with emotive captions, the photomontages in which the separate fragments inform on their neighbours and the photographs/photomontages found on posters alongside slogans are all used to present an ostensible reality that may or may not be true. In conjunction with the photographs, the image environment is what makes propaganda a ‘very powerful force, possibly more effective than the strongest armament’ (Willis 1938: 168). They communicate the message of the propagandist through their aesthetic power. Indeed, the images examined here are mostly the work of talented artists and, until the creation of the Ministerio de Propaganda in November 1936, it was the Fine Arts section of the Ministerio de Instrucción Pública y Bellas Artes that undertook the supervision

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and subvention of poster designers. It has become clear that propaganda, as well as being of great value as a weapon against the enemy, a medium of communication and a vehicle for the distribution of pieces of art (such as photographs and typography), it is also an art form itself. A contributor to Volunteer for Liberty, the newspaper of the International Brigade, wrote that propaganda ‘elevates atrocity into art, transmuting the bitter into the beautiful’ (Stradling 2008: 154). Even though some of the images examined here have been described as ‘sordid’ and ‘unpalatable’, it could be said that they also possess this quality. It is linked with Barthes’ idea of the punctum, the poignancy of the image, and the opportunity to look into the eyes of someone directly affected by the war and to identify with them. In summary, there is no atrocity like artrocity (Stradling 2008: 216). This artrocity is empowering to the propagandist, who is able to communicate his message to his target audience. It is almost always the case with propaganda that it is its creator that wields the majority of the power in the propagandist-propagandee relationship. On the other hand, Sir Francis Bacon is frequently quoted as saying that knowledge is power. The images analysed above, whether they are accompanied by a particularly complex image environment or whether they mostly stand isolated, provide information to the observer and it is this information on the conflict in Spain that constitutes deeper awareness and greater knowledge. The observer is, thus, also empowered.

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Notes –

1. The terms used to describe the two sides that fought in the civil war are contentious because they can imply a specific point of view on the part of an author. The term Nationalist has been widely adopted by historians because the Nationalists, under Franco controlled Spain for forty years and thus made their own version of history. The other side never created one single term for their cause. The term ‘Republican’ is slightly less politicized but there were Nationalists who believed in a Republic, just not one like the unstable Republic of 1936. To avoid contention as far as possible, the terms Nationalist and Republican will be used as these are most commonly used by historians (Cartwright-Punnet 2007: 7)

2. The Non-Intervention Committee was set up by the British and French governments to ‘provide international legal sanction for their determination not to get involved in Spain’ (Stradling 2008: 128).

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Figure Reference

Figure 1 – Merin, P. (Oto Bihalji-Merin). 1938. Spain between Death and Birth (New York: Dodge), p.

Figure 2 – Ministerio de Cultura (ed.). 1992. Kati Horna: Fotografías de la guerra civil española (1937-1938) (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura D.L.), p.88.

Figure 3 – Ministerio de Cultura (ed.). 1992. Kati Horna: Fotografías de la guerra civil española (1937-1938) (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura D.L.), p.35.

Figure 4 – Whelan, R. 2007. This is war! Robert Capa at Work (Göttingen: Steidl), p.161.

Figure 5 – Brothers, C. 1997. War and Photography: A Cultural History (London: Routledge), p.177.

Figure 6 – Brothers, C. 1997. War and Photography: A Cultural History (London: Routledge), p.182.

Figure 7 – Whelan, R. 2007. This is war! Robert Capa at Work (Göttingen: Steidl), p.59.

Figure 8 – Evans, D. 1992. John Heartfield: AIZ/VI 1930-38 (Berlin: Elefanten Press), p. 457.

Figure 9 – Guerra de la Vega, R. 2005. Historia de la Fotografía - Madrid 1931-1939: II República y Guerra Civil (Madrid: Street Art Collection), p. 77.

Figure 10 – Colección J. Díaz Prósper y J. Roca Boix. 1998. Imágenes en Guerra: Memoria estampada en la España de los años 30 (Valencia: Universitat de València), p. 81.

Figure 11 – Fundación Pablo Iglesias. 2004. Carteles de la guerra 1936-1939 (Madrid: Lunwerg Editores), p. 174.

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