Last updated at 10:16 PM on 29th May 2010

Wish I’d had money to buy some of these… would love at least one original (particularly Women of Britain)

Your country needs you, Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, famously declared at the start of the First World War in a 1914 recruitment drive poster. Designed by Alfred Leete, the poster proved a huge propaganda success, thanks to Kitchener, his impressive waxed moustache and pointing finger.

Although it ranks as the most famous British wartime poster, it is only one of a huge range of propaganda pieces being sought by investors. First World War posters that could be bought for about £150 a decade ago now sell for upwards of £400.

Second World War examples, previously attractive only to specialist collectors, are also enjoying wider appeal and a bumper rise in prices.

Confident: Roy Butler says the wartime posters do not seem to date

Roy Butler, 87, partner at military auctioneer Wallis & Wallis in Lewes, East Sussex, believes the continued strength of the images is behind the new demand.

‘The generation with connections to the First World War are dying out while Second World War art work is becoming more appreciated,’ he says.

‘The iconic posters still look fresh, modern and don’t seem to date. They are not only fabulous pieces of art, but of huge historic importance.’

Read more: http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/article-1282532/The-art-warfare.html#ixzz1TXjeF113

Call theme

Visual rhetorics are by definition in the business of persuasion: in both private and public spheres, such rhetorics attempt to change the behaviours of both individuals and groups. From the “Stop” sign at the end of our street, through the visual and verbal warnings on packs of cigarettes, to the recruitment posters of our armed forces, common sense instruction blends into health-expert authority insistence and then into state invitations to die for one’s country.

In this first special issue of The Poster, we invite contributions on the many and different ways in which visual rhetoric intends and is used to inform, instruct, persuade and control our lives. Submissions should be in for October 14th 2011.

The Poster

• Are all visual communications artefacts, at their core, attempts to control others?
• Are some media forms and technologies more effective agencies for control than others?
• Is it possible to have a rhetorically neutral communication.
• Are there visual forms that indicate a form of visual persuasion as opposed to an honest source of information: or is the distinction impossible to make.
• Who uses visual rhetoric in this way?
• How may visual rhetoric be resisted?
• Can we determine where and how informing turns into instruction and where instruction turns into compulsion?
• From the point of view of authorship how the control is communicated to the public sphere?
• What are their “tools”
• How does visual persuasion address ethical and moral issues?

Call focus

The work of artists, designers and other visual practitioners is vitally important to The Poster and in this spirit we are actively seeking visual contributions from practitioners whose work addresses the mechanics of visual control. Visual contributions can be submitted as either peer or non-peer reviewed work (see below for submission information). We are also seeking papers and articles: research, critical, philosophical and theoretical papers on the call theme. All papers will be subject to a rigorous blind peer review process before publication. The journal supports the active exchange of views and encourages contributors to present strong stances where their research supports them.

We also call for reviews of books, exhibitions, mass media and examples of visual rhetorics where they are thematically relevant and are likely to engage the reader’s interests.

Submission details

Papers – Papers should, in the first instance, be provided as MS Word (.doc or .docx), Open Document Text (.odt) or Rich Text Format (.RTF) files with low-resolution images (72dpi) included in the text at the intended positions in the text. Both colour and greyscale images are welcome. Please help us out by using the standard Heading 1 (H1, H2, H3) and Text Body styles as this, and the indication of position of the images, helps us enormously in the editing and production of the final document. Papers should be between 5000 and 8000 words long. Once a paper is accepted we’ll ask for the full resolution images.

Visual contributions – The contributions may be on any subject relevant to the theme but should demonstrate an explicable intent. They should be presented, in the first instance, as low-resolution .jpg or .png files (72 dpi), numbered or otherwise ordered in the way they will be read (if ambiguity is the intent please help us out by sending us a visual that explains their intended organisation). Please include (as either metadata or on an accompanying list) details of copyright, authorship and ownership.

Reviews should be between 1000 and 2000 word long and if they carry images or excerpts of the reviewed material should be copyright cleared with the author or the owners of the intellectual copyright.

I just caught sight of this video – I was at the marches, and it appears that the media were focusing on the small percentage of troublemakers. There was MANY people with cameras however, so a number of different stories can be told… See the original poster, and the full video.

Tuesday 1 March 2011

Events Site. I’m guessing much of this material will come from my book chapter, so be interesting to see the angle. I’ve just been given a comp ticket, so I’ll come along and try to remember what I wrote!!

Watch the video:

Hey you…yes you! Watch this first! from Leapanywhere.com on Vimeo.

Check out this audio slideshow of posters collated by Dr Laragh Gollogly from the World Health Organisation… I really MUST get around to submitting the article that I wrote on Venereal Disease posters… I wrote it in 2004, so it needs a bit of updating…

• Find out more about the book on Amazon.

The intention in this advert as described by ChurchAds.net (and to us at the launch of #cmn10)  was:

The Intention of This Poster
Francis Goodwin, a founder member of ChurchAds.net, said: “This is the kind of thing proud parents-to-be show their friends and family — passing round the scan of the baby.

“Our poster reflects this new way of announcing the news of a new arrival and places the birth of Christ in an ultra-contemporary context. It offers a fresh perspective on the birth of Christ — creating anticipation and alluding to both His humanity and divinity.”

Read more about this years campaign on the ChurchAds.Net site, and on Tony Miles site.

How are the press representing it?

The press are picking up on comments made by Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society ““But it is also the kind of image widely used by anti-abortion campaigners and I hope that the Church of England isn’t trying to use its Christmas poster campaign to make a political point” Times Online, 9th June