Reducing the institutional and complex into the individual and simple, the language and imagery of visual propaganda can be a seductive means of persuasion, historically galvanizing its audience towards either agitation, or a deepening of its general agreement and support.

Propaganda's reductive messages often amount to the barest translations of the human nature of the issues most often portrayed: war, patriotism, social or economic conflict, political unrest, industry, and work. Despite this, as images, many examples of visual propaganda are beautiful, compelling designs, that elicit within me a real emotional - if sometimes romantic - sense of connection to people, ideas, and movements, present and past.

I believe hand-drawn lithographic propaganda posters from the late-19th and early-20th centuries retain a certain humanity. Though the result of a technically modern reproduction process, close inspection of original specimens from the First World War, to the American WPA/FAP, reveals artifacts bearing all manner of human inconsistency. Each hand drawn letter, ink spatter, and registration error is the residue of an attractive, imperfect mechanical interface. Held up to their perfunctory processing and often plainly straightforward messages, every gesture found in a poster's text and imagery offers rest among the alternately hyper-emotional, then deceptively dispassionate, rhetoric and imagery of propaganda.

My parents and grandparents were farmers, soldiers, teachers, and steel workers in the United States, through multiple generations of armed conflict, economic prosperity, and depression. My upbringing and socialization as an American in a working-class family, as well as subsequent employment in industry and construction throughout my young-adult life, has included a slowly evolving, somewhat illiterate sense of pride in words like honor, duty, patriotism, and service. I say illiterate because these concepts seem apparent to all, then become increasingly opaque the higher the volume is turned up. That is to say, locating their origin and substance in my life has proven elusive; to say nothing of decoding the same rhetoric in today's political, social, economic, and military climate.

Alternatively, the substance of my ongoing relationship to labor is clear, both physically and spiritually intimate. I take sincere pleasure from the mechanical exertions of a largely analog printing practice. It provides a meditative simplicity from which I can examine the density of the above ideas, a density owed in large part to the complexities of propaganda strategy. Within the apparently uncomplicated structure of propaganda is an ecologically literal sense of interstitial space. The in-between is teeming with a shared language, where the imagery and text of labor, sacrifice, duty, and pride can bespeak a universal substance and recognition. In their translation at the feet of national interest or political effort, though, these principles are variously honored and perverted, sometimes simultaneously. Though using the same language and confidence as an aesthetic platform, I can hardly imagine my work as emotional persuasion devices or social manipulators of a similar stripe. In fact, this absence of traditional function purposefully admits to a hazy personal relationship with the mileu of political, social, and economic polemics that fill contemporary news feeds, as well as the lofty, one-size-fits-all concepts applied in their service. The nuances of human experience, inevitably involved in these conflicts, demand more than a slogan.

Click here for a written piece about these posters by Tom Wilson, MA (RCA), London, UK.