Covid Propaganda

by Lucy Smith

As a child, I had a particular fascination with the experience of those on the Home Front during World War II. Every time I went to my grandmother’s to stay over I would ask her the same question: “What did you do in the war, grandma?” She would take me into the kitchen, sit me down, light up a Silk Cut cigarette and tell me what it was like to live at such a strange time in history, with all its restrictions on the usual human freedoms we enjoy. I would listen with interest as she told me the same stories over and over again- what sort of gas masks they had, the different types of shelters there were, the ration books, and the propaganda.

We find ourselves living in another strange time in human history, facing a different type of enemy but one which no less impacts on our day to day lives. The language used by the government and the media has, at times, been deliberately evocative of wartime in order to arouse the sort of “blitz spirit” that tends to appeal to the national psyche. 

With this in mind, I thought it would be a fun use of lockdown to try and recreate some of the classic Allied British and American propaganda posters of World War II, updating them to put across messages relating to the coronavirus pandemic which we find ourselves living through. In doing so, I have been able to teach myself some the basics in using Adobe Photoshop. Although I have used other software from Adobe’s creative package, this is my first time using Photoshop so I have managed to go some way to accomplishing that much-popularised quarantine goal of learning a new skill!

I have taken seven wartime posters dealing with diverse subjects such as gardening, prostitution and food waste and given them an update for the Covid-19 generation. I hope the results are amusing as well as carrying some serious messages relating to our behaviour during this time of international crisis.