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: 1984K

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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 of 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. 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. Claud Cockburn, journalist for the Daily Worker,

commented that it was ‘the most photogenic war anyone has ever seen’ (Stradling 2008: 148).

Propaganda, the deliberate dissemination of biased information or ideas to a collective, has been a

human activity as far back as reliable recorded information exists. Propaganda is an inherent part of

warfare and this dissertation will focus on photographs, photomontage and posters produced by several

prominent artists who shared the ideology of the Republican side. 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

construction of and image environment for a photograph 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). We will see how the combination of images to construct an

informative image environment can lead to a surrealistic depiction of the reality of war. Also to be

explored is the statement that a photograph and the image environment in which it becomes a part of

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only forms successful propaganda when it presents ‘biased communication’ (Dovring 1959: 12) as

incontrovertible truth or reality. Propaganda often presents facts selectively, thus lying by omission,

and uses loaded messages to provoke an emotional rather than rational response to the information

presented. Thus, propaganda is inextricably bound up with the issue of revelation and concealment in a

literal as well as figurative sense. Certain propagandists used horrific images of the conflict to

communicate their message and others favoured concealment of some of the more terrible aspects of

the reality of the war. Crucially, documentary photojournalism is not the same concept as propaganda.

Unlike propagandists, documentary photojournalists seek to portray events in a non-partisan manner

and do not endeavour to influence opinion. More often than not, however, the photographer’s own

political allegiance shines through the photographs and so the two overlap. In many cases, propaganda

exploits photojournalism, using supposedly impartial images as fodder for a tendentious campaign.

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, such as fine art, photo journalism and evidence in legal

proceedings, 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)

Sontag suggests 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 is put into question. 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; everything is in its usual position 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 its citizens produced images that portrayed the horrifically sordid and the appallingly absurd

aspects of this fratricidal war in a dichotomic amalgam of the real and the surreal. They include

images of bombed buildings with no façades. 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 building 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 created a Surrealist landscape. The viewer recognizes that the interior of this

flat has been opened up to the outside world, turning a private space into an anonymous public one

in ‘an eruption of the absurd into daily urban life’ (Brothers 1997: 115). The privacy of the

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individual has been lost and is demonstrated most eloquently by the presence of the prying eye of

the camera and, through it, our prying eyes as viewers. There is a crucial distinction between

documentary photojournalism and propaganda (then when I go on to discover how the two overlap

or the latter exploits the former, make that clear too).

This is the physical manifestation of something that ought to be concealed being revealed

in order to show the British and French public the dire situation for civilians who were the

collateral damage of the war in Spain. In taking this image, Capa as photographer is playing the

role of propagandist.

In 1938 Kati Horna, a Hungarian photographer and pioneer of photography of the

women, children and other non-combatants in war zones, was commissioned by the Spanish

Republican government to do a photo reportage of the war that would function as exterior

propaganda. Figure 2, a similar photograph to Capa’s, formed part of this photo reportage and

featured the façade of a bombed building in Lérida. 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 majority of the trees have been destroyed and point bare

limbs towards the sky, as if pointing the finger at the bombers responsible. In the street below a

woman sifts through a pile of household items, perhaps searching for the precious possessions she

has lost. Objects appear displaced by the force of the blast, resulting in surreal and illogical

juxtapositions that are accepted as a consequence of war. The camera captures the tragic realism

of the situation for these people but in a surrealistic way because it records the reality of what is 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 why people take photographs of their loved ones

and happy events: to remember them when they have been erased by time or distance. Horna, like

Capa, acts as the propagandist and champions awareness of the plight of non-combatants. Both

Figure 1 and 2 are powerful in their surreal aspect. They are empowering because they allow the

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viewer access into the private lives of Spanish civilians and to empathize with them. The pathos of

their displaced possessions evokes sympathy for the Republican cause. Evidence of these images

in contemporary publications has been lost. They may have been accompanied by emotive

captions but, nevertheless, they stand alone as revelatory, surrealistic and propagandistic images

narrating the plight of civilians. The image as a whole constitutes a symbol for Republican

propaganda in the face of Fascist aggression.

Photographs can also contain symbols for the viewer to decode. During the Spanish Civil War

photographers took pains to present soldiers as heroic and brave, as well as being conscious of

conforming to tacit rules of taste. 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 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 too shocking for public consumption. Thus, the representation of war,

injury and death was euphemistic in tone and depicted by symbols. The photograph in Figure 3 by

Robert Capa of a dying soldier dictating his last words to a comrade favours concealment to

revelation in this way. There is some blood on the bandage on the soldier’s head but they are

merely symbols of the man’s true suffering and the viewer does not see the full extent of his

wounds. Capa also keeps his distance from the two men, not wanting to intrude into the scene and

so the viewer feels removed from the scene as though it were not real. The image environment is

crucial for this photograph. It 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 broken

sentences. 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.

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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, which becomes a secondary theme.

Unashamedly propagandistic, the caption only gives one interpretation of the image it is attached

to, presenting biased information as incontrovertible truth. 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. In this case, it is the propagandist that is in control and he confidently asserts his

interpretation of the image as fact, making it difficult for the viewer to question the image as a

piece of propaganda and its purpose.

In contrast to the above images, a multitude of unpalatable photographs were taken of the

horrors of war and were published by some publications, particularly French ones such as

Regards, in a manner that can only be described as sordid. The images themselves seem to

‘express disgust at their own sordidness’ (Berger 1971: 184). The photographers and/or the

newspaper editors who organized the layout of this page subscribed to the Surrealist idea of

shocking society by whatever means possible. They heightened the effect of the unpalatable

photographs with the construction of particular image environments. The 12 November 1936 issue

of the British publication the Daily Worker (a Communist newspaper) featured some of the most

dreadful photographs of the war and felt the need to justify why they were printed (Figure 4). The

images are identification photographs of children killed in the raid on the town of Getafe, outside

Madrid, on 30 October 1936. The images come from a dossier of twenty images given by an

anonymous source to Mikhail Koltsov, the powerful 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 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

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behind her head. Here there is no symbolism to represent death, no euphemism to soften the blow

to the viewer’s senses or no attempt to conceal the horror of the consequences of war. Blood stains

their faces, their clothing and the ground and shrapnel wounds criss-cross their faces. The

identification labels on their chests are a sign of their new status as objects to be catalogued and

utilized as 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, the eyes, of the dead is

surreal (despite the obvious veracity of the photograph in depicting the reality of the consequences

of war on civilians) and it takes a few moments to absorb the fact that these children are dead. 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 the

image environment he constructed 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. It is impossible for the viewer

not to be moved by the atrocity of the bombing and it makes more likely the propaganda turning

the minds of the newspaper’s readership against Fascism. A photograph of corpses per se is not by

definition propaganda and many non-partisan publications in Europe may have used the same

images as part of a disturbing but informative reportage. The Daily Worker, however, has

converted documentary photojournalism to propaganda in its juxtaposition of the images with this

particular image environment.

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 an arresting, haunting tragic realism. Brothers suggests that often

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the aesthetic quality of photographs ‘neutralizes their power to disturb and makes the unpalatable

tolerable’ (1997: 170) but only to a certain extent. 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 hearts and

minds 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 and reliability of photographic truth’ (Brothers 1997: 179).

Neither caption nor negative has survived and many critics have suggested 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. However, all

this evidence amounts to nothing when one considers that there are no other soldiers captured in

the photograph and 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 5) 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. Many are 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. In this way, the

image is the epitome of concealment in the guise of revelation to achieve a desired end. The

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American magazine Life constructed an image environment for the first image in Figure 5, an

article on the causes of the war and the death and destruction caused by it in turn (Figure 6). 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. If it is true that this photograph is not a true reflection

of a past reality, 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 photographic truth, the image is merely a propagandistic symbol of the broader

ideology of this era. This photograph stresses that a war death was ‘heroic, and tragic, and that the

individual counted, […] 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 particularly the grotesque images that empowered

the propagandist who, in turn, had power over the thoughts and emotions of the Spanish public

and people in other European countries. 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)

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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 ‘committed their imagination to the service of a mass political struggle’ (Berger 1971: 184).

Different types of image taken from various sources in combination with each other 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)

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. Photomontage as a

construction is a form of political satire and a didactic weapon of propaganda; it is ‘ideal para

expresar la dialéctica marxista’ (Ades 2002: 41). 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 were 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 fragments 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. To the viewer, it is clear the fragments did not

originally belong together on the page; in perceiving this, the viewer is forced to consider why

these particular items have been selected and what they convey in combination. Thus, the various

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parts of a photomontage, acting as symbols, constitute an image environment that informs each

separate part. The image environment also includes text, 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.

The photomontage style derived from early Dada découpage is closely linked to Surrealism

because it creates marvellous images that disturb our normal perception of the world. It is ironic

that photography, our closest mirror of past realities, can be distorted in such a way that those past

realities are no longer recognizable as ‘real’ but surreal. 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 in

Germany during the Second World War but also in Spain during its civil war. Heartfield was aware

of the difference between the comic and the surreal and often exploited the comic, using traditional

caricature and photography to comment on the underlying sinister aspects of the rule of Fascism.

Heartfield made the public instantly aware of the sharp contrast between propaganda and truth;

between the surreal and the real in his work.

Figure 7 is a photomontage from a 1937 issue of the magazine VI (Volks Illustrierte or

People’s Illustrated). It is entitled ‘Baskenland’ (‘Basque Country’) and was produced during the

aftermath of the bombing of the Basque capital, Guernica, by German planes on the orders of

Franco on 27 April 1937. Heartfield 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. 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. Bertolt Brecht described as realist any artwork that helped the

viewer grasp reality. Under this definition, then, this photomontage is also realist because, through

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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 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 of 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 the

folds 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 below it, 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:

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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. Using the image

environment described above, 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.

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. 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

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this reason that photomontage is so successful as propaganda, being geared towards the subtle

revelation of the reality of the war. We assign didactic possibilities to photography, assuming

that photographs point to the truth because they are a supposed direct copy of how events,

people and objects appear in real life, and so it is a potent way to make people take on a certain

mindset or belief and lends power to the propagandist. 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!”. The Ministerio de Propaganda realized the

potential of photomontage as a powerful and empowering weapon in the propaganda battle and

used it to great effect on posters.

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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 Spanish

streets (Aulich 2007: 130). Colourful, 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 morale, 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 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 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 and the effect it had

on its audience. It was during this period that photography was first utilized within the graphic

propaganda field and raised the medium to ‘a new height of emotive communication’ (Thomson

1977: 44). Poster artists gradually came to realize that photographs were more hard-hitting and

visually powerful than drawings and sketches and so were more useful for their task. This is

because 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 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

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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. 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 on 4 November 1936. Aiming to inform the world of the decimation of

the town of Guernica 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. Figure 8 is the French version (Que fais-tu pour empêcher cela?) and is

remarkably similar to ‘Baskenland’ because it also shows the terror-stricken face of a mother and

her child with German planes flying over them. The poster 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. Its propaganda power 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 uses images symbolic of the powerless in contrast

with symbols of 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. We can say for certain that the actual photomontage and the slogan, with its

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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.

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 its effectiveness; 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 somewhat

surreal because of the scale and perspective of the fragments but 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

effective.

Figure 9 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 4. This poster utilizes

revelatory shock tactics 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. 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

18

five years later. 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 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 “military” practice of the rebels: If you tolerate this your 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 poster, however, the image appears in isolation rather than surrounded

by similar photographs of tiny cadavers, softening the blow of the newspaper report in that the

viewer is not bombarded by several terrible images but has chance to process the shock of this

image. 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 its impact. 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. The choice of green for this poster could have been to make it as visible as possible. 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

19

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 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 revelatory shock tactic

employed.

The same photos from the Koltsov dossier were also used on another poster created for

the Ministerio de Propaganda (Figure 10) that combines photography with a slogan and artwork.

In contrast with Figure 9, the artist is free in his or her use of a shocking Republican red for the

background. The photographs on this background are 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.’ This poster aimed 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 understand his slogans. Republican

propagandists had to ensure that any images used on posters to be distributed throughout Europe

would allow foreigners to easily understand the predicament of Spain without necessarily

20

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 symbols for propaganda

material. On 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. 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. They lied 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 there exists the 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, these

21

Koltsov dossier photographs are part of a tableau of deceit fashioned for the purposes of

propaganda. They cannot be taken on face value and nor can their image environment. In essence,

propagandists used fragments of images (often in somewhat surreal montages) as symbols to

convey a subjective message as incontrovertible truth, revealing as much or as little about the

consequences of the war as they deemed necessary.

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 recent budding desire to break the

‘pacto de silencio’ surrounding the period. Spaniards are still deeply affected by the conflict and it

still wields power over their collective psyche. Here, selective memory and forgetting are

palpable, much as we have seen the power of revelation and concealment to be in Republican

propaganda of the period. Similarly, the images used as propaganda endure to the present day

across Europe. These images dominated the hearts and minds of the Spanish, French, British and

American public, influencing opinion and encouraging enlistment. 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. In addition, propagandists were also censors because they concealed

what they thought necessary to produce effective propaganda. In their use of symbolism, Figures

1, 2 and 3 are at the opposite end of the spectrum to the figures that follow them. It is clear that

there are varying degrees of subtlety and openness regarding the use of symbols in propaganda

and this, again, ties propaganda to censorship.

The image environment is what makes propaganda a ‘very powerful force, possibly more

effective than the strongest armament’ (Willis 1938: 168). The images examined here are mostly

the work of talented artists and, until the creation of the Ministerio de Propaganda, it was the Fine

Arts section of the Ministerio de Instrucción Pública y Bellas Artes that undertook the supervision

and subvention of poster designers. It has become clear that propaganda, as well as being of great

22

value as a weapon against the enemy, a medium of communication and a vehicle for the

distribution of pieces of art, is also an art form itself. A contributor to Volunteer for Liberty, the

International Brigade newspaper, 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, whether they conceal or reveal shocking aspects of the war, 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.

23

Notes –

1. The terms used to describe the two sides that fought in the civil war are contentious because they can imply a

standpoint on the part of an author. Historians have widely adopted the term ‘Nationalist’ 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, the

terms ‘Nationalist’ and ‘Republican’ will be used. (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).

7,899 words

24

Figure Reference

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

Figure 4 – Brothers, C. 1997. War and Photography: A Cultural History (London: Routledge),

p.177.

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

p.182.

Figure 6 – Whelan, R. 2007. This is war! Robert Capa at Work (Göttingen: Steidl), p.59.

Figure 7 – Evans, D. 1992. John Heartfield: AIZ/VI 1930-38 (Berlin: Elefanten Press), p. 457.

Figure 8 – Guerra de la Vega, R. 2005. Historia de la Fotografía - Madrid 1931-1939: II

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Figure 9 – 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 10 – Fundación Pablo Iglesias. 2004. Carteles de la guerra 1936-1939 (Madrid: Lunwerg

Editores), p. 174.

25

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