Latin American poster books
Artist and self-confessed book and poster nerd Josh MacPhee shares some of his favourite books about political poster art.
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I was making out a list of books for a friend and realised I could share it. For those that don't know, I'm both a book nerd, and a poster nerd. For years I've been collecting every book about political poster art I can find. Here's just a few of them.
Arnulfo Aquino & Jorge Pérezvega, eds. Imágenes y Símboles del 68: Fotografía y Gráfica del Movimiento Estudiantil. Distrito Federal, México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2004.
The best book available on the political graphics produced during the Mexican student upheaval in 1968. Unlike Europe where screenprinting became the poster production method of choice in the late 1960s, in Mexico the block print was most widely used. In part this was likely due to the graphic history of Mexico and the political printmaking traditions of the Taller de Gráfica Popular.
This book captures a ton of the graphics produced, as well as a lot of photo documentation of banners, marches and the student propaganda brigades that produced and distributed a lot of the prints. The only drawbacks to the book is that it's in Spanish (a bummer for us English-only idiots) and the images are all black & white or a brick red duotone. It looks nice but doesn't give us a full feel for how the colour posters actually looked.
Eduardo Castillo Espinoza. Cartel Chileno 1963-1973. Santiago, Chile: Ediciones B Chile, 2006.
This one is particularly hard to find but well worth the search. It was actually brought this back from Chile for me. First, it's giant, 11"x15", so you almost get the full feel of what these images actually look like as posters. The focus here is on the Allende years and there are a couple framing essays in Spanish.
The real treasure is the posters, over 90 full page images and on top of that, there are a half dozen images of some of the posters in development from rough pencil sketches to colored marker proofs. This is a rare insight into historical poster production, all of these made before computers were used for design. Interestingly, most of the posters here were created by a handful of designers including Vincente Larrea, Waldo González Hervé and Mario Quirez but were commissioned by a wide array of organisations such as unions, universities, political parties, musiciansand film houses.
Russ Davidson, ed. Latin American Posters: Public Aesthetics and Mass Politics. Sante Fe, NM: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2006.
Definitely one of the best cross sections of posters from across Latin America. It definitely has it's fair share of Cuban (although some are lesser seen images produced by OCLAE and the UIE) and Chilean posters but there's also a fair showing of material from Puerto Rico, Mexico, Nicaragua, Argentina and El Salvador. Plus, some images from countries rarely represented in poster collections like Panama and Peru. The clutch of image of Puerto Rican screenprints are quite a treat, often competing with Cuban work in design and colour usage but with their own distinct aesthetic flair.
Check out Josh's full list at Just Seeds
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Latin American poster books (text) by Josh MacPhee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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