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How they made an impact. A short selection of significant prints from the “History of Press Graphics. 1819-1921”
What sails here under the flag of caricature is nothing other than an early form of blunt and bleak social realism. The group makes a powerful and monumental impression, misery in the dimension of a history picture, and that’s exactly how it was meant to be. The publisher of La Caricature, Charles Philipon, like most […]
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Scenes from the Armenian Massacres of 1896
These first near-genocidal series of atrocities committed against the Armenian population were carried out during the reign of Abdul Hamid II, the last sultan effectively to rule over the Turkish state. The police responded to a demonstration held in Constantinople in September 1895 by Armenian political organizations which sought to pressure the government and the […]
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“Elegant and dignified military operations in the present age.” – The imperfect invisibility of collateral damage in late 19th-century metropolitan illustrated magazines.
Adapted (05/2014) with permission from the chapter of the same title: p. 205-232 of Stephen J. Rockel and Rick Halpern (ed.s) Inventing Collateral damage: Civilian Casualties, War, and Empire Between the Lines Press, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2009. ISBN 978-1-897071-12-0 This paper discusses some evidence of how overseas imperialism looked to imperialists at home, as the […]
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The rehabilitation. Gustave Doré in Paris, Strasbourg and in Ottawa.
The profession of illustration and the disrepute it got into are both a product of 19th century industrialized journalism. The business´ high altitude flight as well as it´s crash are manifest in the work of one single person, the Alsatian graphic artist, painter and sculptor Gustave Doré (1832-1883). Along with Gustave Courbet he was the […]
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Images from the earliest modern Afghan Wars
The first military conflict covered by the illustrated popular press after its foundation in May 1842 was a war in Afghanistan. But the depictions of the defeat of the British occupation forces in the Asian borderland, which was of equally vital strategical importance for the British as for the Russian Empire, were solely fictitious and […]
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Remember Korea / Gondolj Koreara (1952), Budapest, 1952
-The key issue of the graphic portfolio created by the Hungarian artist Bencze László is the massacre near Sichon, North Korea, in the autumn and winter of 1950 with more than thirty thousand victims, mainly civilians. From the Communist side, these war atrocities were attributed to the American invading forces. Like Picasso’s famous painting Massacre […]
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Henri Durand-Brager, Special artist of Bonapartism
“The eyes of the world are upon us! … Misfortune has its heroism and its fame.” (Napoleon Bonaparte, St. Helena, Nov. 1815) “The Napoleonic idea broke forth from St. Helena like the moral doctrine of the Gospel, which had risen, certain of victory, from the agonies of the Calvary.” (Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, L´Idée Napoléonienne, 1840) In […]
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Evil Empires I: Concentration camps in the Transvaal
During the Second Boer War the prestige of the British Empire sank to an all-time low. The main reason was the establishment of concentration camps in South Africa as a measure against the guerrilla war led by the local farmers against the Empire. Over 26,000 Boers, mainly women and children, died of hunger and diseases […]
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“Vogelmen Diaries” – Exhibition film and related archive articles (Melton Prior Institute im Heidelberger Kunstverein, 17.11.2012 – 27.1.2013)
Exhibition Film. Click on the image to play. . Fletcher DuBois performs the “Vogelmen Diaries” at the opening. Main Hall, Southern Wall: Thomas Nast, “Our System of Feathering Nests ..” Main Hall, Northern Wall: Thomas Nast, “Let Us Prey!” > Faits Divers – Illustrations: Crashes and Collapses > Thomas Nast: “Dead Men´s Clothes Soon Wear […]
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Death in the Shadows. “Black.Light Project”
The Black.Light project, which was initiated by war photographer Wolf Boewig and his companion, the travel writer Pedro Rosa Mendes, togehter with the graphic designers Henning Ahlers and Christopher Ermisch, is in many respects an adventurous one and, when it comes to openness and extension, without precedent: Ten comic artists, which are renowned for their fictitious work […]