Campaign Posters

Quinn: Hello and welcome back to Pictorial on Relay FM. I’m Quinn Rose, and I am someone who did not go to art school, but I love learning about art, both impractical and practical throughout history.

Betty: Hi, and I'm Betty. I'm also someone who did not go to art school, but I also love learning about art. I have been working as a gallery guide in an art gallery for the last eight plus years. And this topic doesn't have much to do with art galleries, but it's still interesting. 

Quinn: So today is a big day. This episode is going up on election day in the United States. A fact that definitely doesn't make me want to die. So, I highly doubt that anyone needs this art history podcast to tell them to vote. But you should do that if you haven't already today, if you're listening to this the day it goes out, go vote. Yay democracy. This episode is not about that election, but it is about election posters throughout history. We're going to talk about a few different ones, especially the 2008 Obama campaign that created an absolutely iconic image. We're talking about those from an artistic perspective and the stories behind their design and stuff like that. Nothing about this specific election, because again, it does make me want to die. So. Also, we won't be talking about the results of the election on any episodes past this one. You don't have to worry about that mostly because these are all gonna be prerecorded. So like for example, the episode that's going to premiere in two weeks is still recorded by people in the past who don't know the results of the election yet. Isn't that exciting slash bad? Who knows if it's going to be better or worse? No one, not me. Cause the election hasn't happened yet. Okay. All of that aside. How about we dive into it? Hello, Betty.

Betty: Hi, hi!

Quinn: Like I mentioned today, we are actually talking about campaign posters. So a lot of the conversation today is going to be specifically about the Obama hope poster campaign. But before we get into that, we want to do a little bit of historical overview of some other notable features of poster design, and other notable posters throughout history. Oh, and we're focusing specifically on the United States here cause yay, election day. So one thing that you might notice from a lot of posters is they, most of them kind of look the same. They're big bold red, white, and blue, lots of stars and stripes, get some eagles in there. The whole point is they're very safe. They just kinda, it's just like, bam, candidates name, the year of the election, some stars, great, America. And these are like perfectly functional, but this is why the ones that are more unusual and more creative tend to stick with us so much more. Like no one remembers what campaign posters look like when they just follow this template, but some are different enough and they end up striking a cord with people and even getting recorded in the history books sometimes.

Betty: Yeah. And I actually, while researching for this episode, I came across an article about a book, and it's a book I really want to get. Cause it just seems so interesting. So it was published maybe about 10 years ago by the Library of Congress and it's called “Presidential Campaign Posters: 200 years of Election Art.” So it has a hundred pages, it’s a large format book. I'm actually not sure how big it is. I think it's as big as a poster. So this book might be expensive. It’s a hundred posters, but, and it's ready to be teared out, so you can frame this in your house, of a hundred posters over the years. It's the past it's from the 18, like early 1800s till 2008. I think. So it has all kinds of posters, you know, has from all different political parties, like not just Democrat and Republican, but also like third parties, like independent parties, you know, parties that never actually really ended up making a difference in, the, well, I shouldn't say that, but at least they don't get a lot of votes. But the, but some of them actually probably do make a difference or an impact, and some of the posters kind of also, I think in a way demonstrates that. It's really interesting. And some of it is really funny and it’s, yeah, I think it would just be fun to, I don't know, have this book and have 100 random American posters around my house. And people would just be like, what?

Quinn: Some of them are very fun. One of my favorite ones that I'm seeing here is this poster that is in a really cool style. So across the very top, it says McCarthy in this cool blocky script. And at the bottom it says Peace in these bold blue letters, which actually is a little bit reminiscent of the famous Obama poster. And in the middle there's this outline drawing of a dove that is done with red and blue stripes of different colors across it. So it's reminiscent of these more traditional style of posters, but it's funky. It looks really cool. Like this is an aesthetic that I actually really. On the other hand, I feel like the McCarthy name has been so ruined that I could never like display this. Also I don't know a lot about Eugene McCarthy. This is from Eugene McCarthy’s campaign in 1968, but it's a cool looking poster regardless.

Betty: So he was a Democrat Senator, or Senator, and he was also in the House of Representatives. And in 1968 he was actually challenging Lyndon B Johnson for the Democratic nomination, because he was on an anti-Vietnam war platform. So apparently he actually sought the presidency five times, but never, you know, never won obviously. Because nobody remembers President Eugene McCarthy. It is an interesting, it's got that like funky sixties, you know, like it looks like it could be on a tie dye shirt type of bird. And, you know, obviously, you know, anti-war sentiment, you know, was quite huge in the US at the time, so I can kind of see how like it became popular or like, well, no, cause yeah, what I was googling campaign posters, I actually saw a lot of like E-bay postings of like posters, like real posters from 1968. You know, like on, on sale or auction and apparently some people want to collect them.

Quinn: One other kind of poster design that I thought was really interesting was all these images of Jimmy Carter depicted as Jesus Christ. And these were not official—this was not an official campaign from like the Jimmy Carter for president campaign. But they really, his supporters really saw him as this great figure. And because they have the same initials, they did this thing where it was “JC can save America” and he's all looking angelic and Jesus-like in this picture. I just thought that was kind of fun as well. And that goes to sometimes the posters that are made outside the campaign can be even more impactful than kind of the official like standardized campaign branding.

Betty: There are other sort of outrageous posters similar to this one. One of the earliest ones that I found, and again, I don't know my American history all that well, so some of this context is lost on me. Maybe you can help, Quinn, or maybe this is before your time as well. So in 1856, which was James Buchanan versus James Fremont. There's, it's a poster of a donkey. It's like a hand drawn donkey cause I guess at the time they didn't have photos. And it says “hunkers attend fire away. The above is a true likeness of the ‘ten cent Jimmy’ Buchanan, the ‘Damed-Black-Rat’s’ candidate for president,” there's some other stuff. And then at the bottom it says P.S., quote unquote, "Jimmy, you cannot win.” Presumably it's from the Fremont campaign and it's saying Jimmy Buchanan, you can not win. And I guess he's a donkey because he's cheap. I don't know.

Quinn: Well, okay, so the donkey is the symbol of the Democratic party. 

Betty: Oh, that makes sense.

Quinn: So that’s where that came from. I don't know what the hell “Damed-Black-Rat” or “ten cent Jimmy” means.

Betty: Like, oh yeah. Apparently old Jimmy buck goes for the win, but. Okay. Anyway, there's like a, there's like a poem there about Jimmy and all that stuff. Anyway, it's just, yeah. Okay, the donkey Democrat symbolism makes a bit more sense. But since I don't remember a President James Fremont, I'm assuming he lost. Anyway, yeah that's just like one of the earliest posters I think, in the book. And it shows you, there were always kind of weird.

Quinn: There are always weird things out there.

Betty: One of the, one of the other ones that I found kind of funny is there's the 1948 poster, which is, it's actually not a Democrat or Republican poster. It’s a, the election was a Harry S Truman versus Thomas E Dewey. But there was another party that was running, or another candidate that was running for the Progressive Party. His name is Henry A. Wallace, while this is not actually on this poster. So the poster was created by artist Ben Sean, and it's kind of like a negative campaign poster. So he has a satirical image of Harry Truman playing a piano and Thomas Dewey, the Republican, is sitting on top of the piano, and it's based on this famous photograph of Harry Truman, who was vice president, playing a piano with an actress named Lauren Bacall who was like lounging seductively on the piano. And then, so, so he's kind of using this image to kind of say, you know, these two presidential candidates are just, I don't know, it's just kind of trying to seduce each other. I actually don't know. But on the piano, there's a bunch of messages. So instead of like sheet music, it's a bunch of messages. Some are saying “a good man is hard to find,” “it had to be you,” and a bunch of words like that. So yeah, it's kind of like their way of, I guess, satirizing the two major parties and trying to say that a good man is hard to find. So don't vote for these two, vote for Henry A. Wallace, but quite honestly, I don't see the words Harry A. Wallace anywhere on this poster. So, you know, not really, not really working so well for you there, Wallace. But not that you had that great of a chance anyway. So yeah, I just, I thought that was pretty hilarious.

Quinn: He's not doing so good at the name recognition.

Betty: No, so, but maybe he just really liked that picture of Truman. Oh, and then before we move on to contemporary, I did just look at the poster in 1984, which was Reagan. So yeah, Reagan and Bush in 84, it's a poster. And this definitely looks like when it was made for their campaign. So it's like a picture of Reagan in the middle with Bush on the, on his right. And then another picture of Reagan on his left? Anyway. And it's the, the slogan is “bring America back” and I'm like, oh, they just use the same words for all their campaigns, but change it slightly.

Quinn: Yeah, I do hate this poster very much. And I don't know if I'm just projecting my hate of Reagan onto it, but like, it also is not aesthetically pleasing. It's very busy. The colors are muted. It's not good stylistically. Not a fan.

Betty: Yeah. Like it's not, it's not like, you know, of all the posters, it is, it is quite complex. And it's not necessarily the best poster there, but anyway, I just scrolled past this and I'm just like, okay, well, you know, they really just use similar marketing, for different people.

Quinn: Yeah. One poster that always gets included on every single list of remarkable campaign posters is the Obama Hope poster campaign. And so I am 23 years old. So the Obama campaign in 2008 and his election was one of the very first major political events that I actually remember and was actually like alive enough to experience. And so I saw the poster everywhere, but I never knew anything about it really. And so I got to look up some stuff about where it actually came from. So the poster was designed by an artist named Shepard Fairey. And I thought this was interesting is that basically Fairey was a fan of Obama as he was running for president, but he was sort of like this somewhat controversial figure. He’s this contemporary street artist and he was worried that his sort of reputation as this outsider is that he would actually hurt the Obama campaign by campaigning for him. So he wasn't sure exactly what he wanted to do, but then he got hooked up with Yosi Sergent who was a sort of marketing person who was working as a consultant on the Obama campaign. And he was like, all right, let's do this. I want, you can design a poster for him and let's do that. And so in sort of conjunction with Sergent, he ended up designing what would be known as the Hope poster. So he took this image like kind of off of Google Images of this picture of Obama. He said he was looking for something that was strong, but not intimidating. He simplified out the image, kind of smoothed it out, made a little more geometric. He stayed with the traditional red, white, and blue color palette, but he played with it where like different shades of the red and blue than the sort of typical campaign posters make it look not quite as standard. And then used those colors all over the whole poster. So it as a very particular stylized color scheme. And then they printed a couple of hundred of these. What I thought was really interesting as he actually used his own logo in the image. So over the Obama campaign symbol, he put his own little logo because he didn't think this was going to be popular at all. So he wanted it up there just to like his diehard fans would have definitely at least buy it because they would want to complete their collections. So he's like, great I'll do that, just to guarantee that we can like sell these first couple hundred that I'm printing. This was about two weeks before Super Tuesday. He got the go-ahead to like do it. So he like screen printed hundreds of pictures. He sold 350, just put 350 up and then use the money he got from selling the 350 to print 4,000 posters. And then they went to some rallies around Super Tuesday and just passed them all out for free. And it went super viral. It sort of, they both had good networks already and like sort of, he had a fan base already, but it just so resonated with the people at those rallies and the people who were supporting Obama's campaign. And just like everyone was like, yes, of course. In an interview about this he compared it to the Rolling Stones tongue logo. So that the tongue that is so emblematic of Rolling Stones was just sort of a secondary logo on the back of an album. But then it just really caught on with people. And so now it's like the symbol of the Rolling Stones and it's like a similar thing that happened with this poster. And they really thought it was going to go much slower than that. And they weren't even really prepared for the response. Also the first 700 that they made all said “progress”, but then they got feedback from the campaign that they wanted to say “hope” instead. So the rest of them that they printed ended up saying “hope”. And that's kind of the iconic image that we're, that we are left with. And he talked a little bit about sort of distribution of it. Apparently there were rumors that he had like street teams all over the country. They were putting up his posters in different locations, but he's like, that's not what happened at all. Like, it really was totally grassroots. People were just so excited about both the campaign and the image, they loved it so much that people were just of their own volition, just like getting it all over the place. So it was everywhere. It was like covering the cities with this, with this image of hope. And he also said that there were a lot of rumors that he like made a ton of money off of this. And so he didn't want to like, even suggest that he was making a lot of money off of this. So he said that how he balanced this was he would sell fine, as he put it “fine art commissions” of the Obama image to private collectors and then use whatever money he got from those sales to just print the posters for free. So as he put it, so at the time of the election, he said that he had sold less than 2000 posters for money and he printed over 200,000 of them just for free distributed across the country.

Betty: Hmm. Yeah, it is interesting. Cause Shepard Fairey was, or still is a, best known as a street artist. And I'm not sure if this is one of the first times, if not the first time, like a campaign officially, you know, hired somebody who's a street artist to produce their campaign posters. But I just find it interesting, like ironic kind of that—so I had kind of heard of Shepard Fairey before, but only because of his Obey posters, where it's like, I guess probably what he's was most well known for before the Hope poster was he in 1989, when he was going to a design school at the Rhode Island School of Design, he made this poster with, it's a picture of Andre the Giant, again, in that like contrast, see black and white print style. And then he has just a giant words that says “obey” at the bottom. And I don't think there's really like concrete meaning in that obey, but it's like, you know, it's just so iconic and people see it and you're just like, whoa, like what is that? And so, but yeah, I find it just ironic because it's kind of like, they're very similar styles and it's a very signature Shepard Fairey style, but the Obey is kind of like menacing looking like, oh, like what's going on? Whereas the Hope is like, you know, meant to evoke hopefulness and like, you know, good things supposedly. And so it is just interesting that like, it came from the same person not only, but it's like the same style, but it can have such different meanings.

Quinn: Yeah. It is really cool how he sort of morphed his style in order to match a campaign that had a very specific message and that they were able to work in collaboration of like having somewhat similar goals, but different backgrounds and sort of images that they wanted to portray, but still managed to work together to create something that is this iconic. There are some controversies around this. He got in trouble for copyright infringement because of the picture that it was based on. And that was a whole thing. He like destroyed evidence, not great. He did, he got in trouble for that, not ideal.

Betty: I will say that when I was looking through the book about campaign posters. And obviously one of the ones more recent ones that was included was the Obama Hope poster. But there was another poster from 2008 in that, in that book, which I've never seen because it probably got overshadowed, but it's actually really beautiful. So it is the “progress poster.” So, I don't know if this was back when they were using the word progress or maybe this person was told to use the word progress. I have no idea, but this is a poster… so I guess it's officially titled The Progress Poster by the artist Scott Hanson. And I actually found a pretty cool odd article on his blog, which he went through the making of this poster. So it's similar to the Hope poster, but kind of different. It's just got a big O in the middle. That's the Obama official campaign logo. And then it says progress at the bottom and the O is surrounded by like some concentric circles. And then there's like a tree sprouting out of it. And there's people holding hands and the roots of the tree is like spreading downward onto like that progress word. And yeah, so, and the tree is like, you know, it takes up the rest of the, or basically the top half. So again, it is interesting cause it doesn't actually say Obama, but I guess, you know, from the O you would know who it is, and it doesn't have Obama's face either. But I just think like from a graphic design point of view, it is really beautiful. You know, there are some, there are better or worse designed posters in history, but whether this one's effective or not in terms of campaign messaging, I, you know, I can't really speak to that. Definitely it's not as impactful as Shepard Fairey’s poster, but, I think it's, it's really beautiful. And he kind of has this like pretty cool, just like making of design posters, it just kind of, you know, maybe in a way it, you can see like the, how a campaign poster is made and how, or how a graphic designer works and how he kind of used different images of trees. And he had like different incarnations of how he, how he drew the tree and then, kind of like how he laid it out, even in Illustrator, like he shows his layers in Illustrator, which, as a person who studied design, I was just like, oh, cool. And then he's zoomed into like these details of the tree and how he made the leaves and the people and all this stuff. So yeah, I think like, I don't, I don't really have much comments about this poster, just other than the fact that it's really pretty. It’s like seeing that poster I was after, I'm like, honestly, I just want to get this book so I can put some of the nicer looking posters as like art on my wall.

Quinn: This is really cool. And of course, this will be linked in the show notes with all of that in-depth information of how this has made, but you're right. This is a beautiful poster. And it is interesting, the early version actually had his name in it, and then it got changed. But I guess maybe the symbol of the campaign was enough to signify it as the Obama campaign, I guess. But it is really well designed.

Betty: Well, I mean, technically the Hope poster doesn't have Obama's full name on the poster either, but you know, at least it has his face. Although I maybe the O is enough to symbolize who it is.

Quinn: I guess. Well I mean the Hope poster has his entire face on it. So if you don't know who it is by that point, like that's really your own problem.

Betty: Yeah. It's true.

Quinn: Well, I think that brings us to the end for today. Thank you so much to listening to this very special election themed episode of Pictorial. Ugh If you want to see our show notes or anything we talked about today, that'll be at relay.fm/pictorial. You can also find us on Twitter or Instagram @PictorialPod. And if you want to, you can follow me on Twitter or Instagram @aspiringrobotfm. 

Betty: And you can follow me on Twitter or Instagram @articulationsV. And I'm also on YouTube as ARTiculations. And speaking of YouTube, we also upload these podcast episodes to YouTube under the Pictorial Podcasts YouTube channel, where you can listen to the entire podcast, but you can also see the posters appear on screen as we speak about them.

Quinn: Thanks for listening, art enthusiasts!