Image Comparison 1

Poster by Saville Lumley (1915)

This is a poster aimed to emotionally blackmail. It is aimed at men with family values and enough money to make it through the war without being a soldier. It intends to persuade them to sign up to the army. This is before it was mandatory to go to war for all young men. It is set after the war,

“what did you do in the great war?”

The text is italicized to make it seem more personal, like a handwritten note. The “YOU” is capitalised and underlined directing it at the reader of the poster. It is spoken by the daughter of the man while his son sits on the floor playing with toy soldiers, glorifying the idea and implying that it is the duty and nature of all young men to go to war and that perhaps the son has already outgrown the father as a man. The son and father also both where red, although the fathers red jacket is faded, to me this connotes a fading figure of a man where the son is the future. The red rose is all over the poster as a pattern as are English flag colours. The text itself implies that everything has turned out ok because it is in the past tense. It even goes so far as to refer to a current war as ‘the Great War.’

The Uncle Sam Range by Schumacher and Ettlinger (1876)

The purpose of this advert is to sell The Uncle Sam Cooking Range by promoting it as a tool for gaining high social status. It is aimed at men with enough money to afford it but not enough to be so comfortable that they don’t care about gaining higher social status. This is the main focus of the advert as the product is only half shown. The poster features central an al American male, sat in grandiose dining room at the table, his wife serving food and a slave cooking at the stove. The slave herself is status symbol. There are many images in this advert that are intended to make independent American seem superior to the rest of the world intending to make the American viewer believe he is already half way at least to be becoming a superior being to the rest of the human race. A clock in the top left has one hand at ‘1776’ (Independence day) and the other on the current year (1876,) one hundred years on. The man is set with globe character with a caricature African face taking the place of the African continent. Written on the table cloth is “Uncle Sam’s Dinner Party’ The globe is holding a menu for the world divided by country serving stereotypical staple diets. For example, China are being served boiled birds’ nests and locusts and Ireland get potatoes served in all the various ways of serving them. The all American male however is being served roast poultry with a variety of vegetables that we can see. Through the window we see Centenary Hall, Philadelphia, where they held an exhibition of American culture.

Both images are focused on men within a certain social status. While the American poster relies on the man wanting to gain higher social status, the war poster relies on the attitude of the man making him a target for emotional blackmail. Both rely on patriotism as a given in the audience. Both images rely on a fantasy structure to be built in the audiences mind through the use of unconscious imagery and typography. They can then manipulate for their own gain.