It’s Just an Ironic Poster, Dummy!
Surveillance Means Security is a collection of posters from Micah Wright, an animator turned writer whose satirical remixes of WWI and WWII propaganda posters have previously been published in The New York Times, The Guardian and The Boston Globe.
Wright’s art provides a timely subversion of the language of classic US war-era posters. In his latest book, a follow up to You Back the Attack! We Bomb Who We Want! and If You’re Not a Terrorist… Then Stop Asking Questions, he reworks 50 posters to provide a pithy commentary on a range of contemporary issues from gay marriage and surveillance to corporate corruption, Hurricane Katrina and, of course, the Iraq war.
Each remixed poster is accompanied by a tightly written exposé of the themes dealt with in the artwork and Wright also displays all the oringal source material at the back of the book along with all of his quoted written sources.
After seeing a series of National Security Administration posters in 2001 that bore a strong resemblance to fascist imagery, Wright was inspired to begin remaking old propaganda in an attempt to highlight the deep hypocrisy within modern American politics.
Like the US cartoonist David Rees, whose Get Your War On strip resamples the bland, expressionless imagery available in Clip Art, Wright’s reworkings of more classical patriotism work similarly and, like the most powerful of satires, touch on the hardest of truths.
Cover of Surveillance Means Security
Over 500 of Wright’s posters can be seen at www.antiwarposters.com.
Surveillance Means Security: Remixed War Propaganda is published by Seven Stories Press at £12.99.
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