Posters, A Global History

Posters are ubiquitous. They hang on office walls, bedroom doors and bus shelters. But what relevance do they have today in our age of image saturation, of prolific social media and electronic devices? In ‘Posters: A Global History’ Elizabeth Guffey tells the story of this ephemeral art form, from its birth in the nineteenth century to its place in contemporary culture. She argues that even among today’s burgeoning digital media, few forms of graphic design can rival posters for their tangibility and sheer spatial presence. From London to Ramallah, Los Angeles to Lagos, posters provide new opportunities to communicate across public spaces that are themselves increasingly transformed by digital media. This book re-examines the roots of the poster, charting its rise from the revolutionary lithographs that papered nineteenth-century London and Paris to twentieth-century works of propaganda, advertising, pop culture and protest. It considers the lives of posters: where and why posters were made, and why and how they endured. It examines posters from today’s world, including posters of Palestinian martyrs and West African examples describing voodoo activities, and offers a rich variety of both familiar and lesser-known examples from the Soviet Union, China, Eastern and Western Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere. Beautifully illustrated, Posters provides a fresh history of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century poster as well as revealing insights into the designs and creative practices of our twenty-first-century world.