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). War propaganda comes in many different visual forms but this dissertation will focus on photographs, photomontage and posters produced several prominent and talented 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 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 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. 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 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)

Sontag 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 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; 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 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 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. 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 and empowering in that they allow the viewer access into the private lives of Spanish civilians and to empathize with them. The pathos of their displaced possessions evoke sympathy for the Republican cause. Evidence of these images in contemporary publications has been lost. They may have been accompanied by emotive captions

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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 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, 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) 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. 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 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

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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. 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. 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.

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 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 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 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 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

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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)

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). 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)

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 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.

Photomontage is also closely linked to Surrealism because it creates marvellous images that disturb our normal perception of the world and perplex us. It is ironic that photography, the closest mirror of past realities we have, can be distorted in such a way that those past realities are no

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longer recognizable as ‘real’ and are seen to be surreal. Max Ernst was one of the first artists to explore the disorientating power of fragments of photographs in combination to create a series of new realities and was well aware of maintaining a balance between the surreal and the comical, which he considered to be very different. 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. Like Ernst, Heartfield was aware of the difference between the comic and the surreal but, unlike Ernst, he often exploited the comic, using traditional caricature and photography to comment on the underlying sinister aspects of the rule of Fascism. 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 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 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 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 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:

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

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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 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.

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

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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 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 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 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, examined above. This poster utilizes revelatory shock tactics to convince the British, French and American publics of the

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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 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 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

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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 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 as an ends to a mean. 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 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, these 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, having not yet been relegated to history. Similarly, the images used in the propaganda of the period endure to the present day across Europe. These images held sway on the hearts and minds of the Spanish, French, British and American public, influencing opinion and encouraging 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. In addition, propagandists

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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 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.

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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 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).

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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 – 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 República y Guerra Civil (Madrid: Street Art Collection), p. 77.

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.

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