1. This chapter is a development of ideas set out in J. Aulich and J. Hewitt (2007) Seduction or Instruction. First World War Posters in Britain and Europe (Manchester, New York and Vancouver: Manchester University Press).
2. See W.J.T. Mitchell (2005) What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).
3. J. Butler (2009) Frames of War. When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso), p. 42.
4. A pre-eminent practitioner in this regard is Gerald Spenser Pryce. See the Labour Party poster, ‘Forward! The Day is Breaking’ (1910), which depicts an heroic worker leading the huddled masses. Reproduced in B. Margadant (1998) Hoffnung und Widerstand. Das 20. Jahrhundert im Plakat der internationalen Arbeiter — und Friedensbewegung (Zurich: Verlag Hans-Rudolf Lutz und Museum für Gestaltung), fig. 3.
5. I am taking W.J. T. Mitchell’s definition of the visual in this context as an ‘image-text’, which places the image in a theoretical frame where the reception of the image is variably determined by associated verbal imagery as much as by the cultural, historical and iconographical contexts of the image itself. See W. J. T. Mitchell (1986) Iconology. Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press) and (1994) Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).