I joined the German Ph.D. program at Vanderbilt University during the fall of 2017. Hailing from Colorado, I received my B.A. in German Studies, English, and Film from the University of New Mexico (2014), followed by a Master's in German Studies (2016) at the same institution. My research interests primarily concern the intersection of German and cultural studies with media and film, and include aesthetic representations of children and childhood, trauma studies and collective/palimpsestic memory, queer representation in film, particularly the development of LGBT representation in German cinema from the Weimar Republic to the present, and gender and sexuality in horror and slasher films.
The posters presented here were created by combining propaganda posters, postcards, and picture books from the first world war (1914-1918) with a collection of 21st century advertisements (2008-2019). The WWI sources were drawn from French, US-American, Canadian, British, and German campaigns, while all of the recent advertisements come from the US, the UK, and Germany. Each poster is a collage of different elements from both time periods.
Project goals: to use WWI and 21st century media to the similarity between how each uses children, and to manufacture difference and disparity between the messages they were originally intended to convey and the different ways they can be used
Why WWI?
- Pop culture, popular discourse, and much of academia accepts a narrative that places WWII as one of the most (if not the most) significant events of the 20th century, with WWI functioning as a prologue--but what happens if we question that narrative and look at WWI as its own massive and devastating historical moment?
- Emergence of modernity, nationalism, and propaganda: though all of these concepts certainly emerged before WWI, the scale and intensity of each of these in WWI is unprecedented--and the rise of all three can be tracked through visual media.
- Simple symmetry: many of the original images are 100 years removed from each other. Toggling across this span between two similar chronological moments (the 'end of the beginning' of the new century) shows how far we've come--and how far we haven't.
Some theoretical background:
Fortunati, Vita and Lamberti, Elena, ed. Memories and Representations of War: The Case of World War I and World War II. Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V., 2009.
- cultural memory is tied to how history and experience are read in time, individually and collectively--and can be forgotten
Kingsbury, Celia Malone. For Home and Country: World War I Propaganda and the Home Front. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2010.
- children are expected to participate in the war effort--and are expected to pressure their parents to do the same
- Images of children 'enlisted,' creating infant soldiers to either lionize friendly soldiers or demean enemy soldiers
- The takeaway: images of children were being deliberately re-purposed to represent the war, and to transport its needs and dangers into the domestic sphere.
2. Difference: what happens to images of children when we alter their original context?
Of course, not every image of children is used to sell war or products. Many campaigns (both from WWI and today) use representations of children to further charitable and important goals.
Still, the emotions we might experience for children can happen independently of these positive campaigns and their ideologies.
(translation: The country needs German children. Taken from an election campaign from the NPD, a German extreme nationalist party.)
The symbol of the child is an empty vessel: it relies predominantly conveying ideological thought by evoking allegedly universal feelings of protection, nostalgia, and the domestic. Because of this reliance on emotion, these symbols can be made to support anything.
Creating the posters:
CMAP goals: to improve my proficiency with new technologies (Photoshop, Spark) while challenging myself to work in a medium I've never considered (graphic design)
Step 1: gathering images
Primary sources: Library of Congress, Imperial War Museum, London, and Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archives) for WWI sources, and google, Ads of the World for 21st century sources
Step 2: Trial and Error. I played with approximately 40 different images and slogans to see which resonated with each other.
So what did I learn?
1. Consider the parents!
2. Don't forget the other narratives!
3. Analyze posters and pictures as images first--how does their design convey their message?
3. How do the images I research act in a larger narrative from WWI to the present?