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There can be few better places to begin thinking about public health and visual imagery than Oliviero Toscani's wonderfully irreverent poster, "Dying on AIDS". FIG. 1 'Dying on Aids', by permission of United Colors of Benetton First released as a press photo in November 1990 and reconceived by Toscani as a part of an advertising campaign for the Un...
Citations
... More importantly, images of pandemic contain more than evidentiary character. This essay views pandemic images not merely as objects that reflect truths and facts, but as intermediaries that are endowed with meanings, while being deployed to communicate certain social perspectives, construct certain ideas of medicine and science, and structure the way (s) audience see reality (Cooter & Stein 2010;Engelmann 2018;Ehring 1994;Hattori 2011;Imada 2017;Jordanova 1990). ...
Pandemic governance is a field of actions, practices and activities, of which visualization constitutes a significant part, carried out by state and non-state actors, health professionals and lay persons, with the aim to directly or indirectly improve the management of pandemic. This short essay is a reflection on the various forms of visualization in managing and governing covid-19 pandemic in Malaysia, including projection model, mapping, body marking and visual storytelling. One form often prevails over the other as the pandemic evolves and new situation arises. While useful for rendering invisible infection risk visible, color coding at once stigmatizes the space and human bodies marked as contagious or potentially pathogenic, revealing the tension between risk reduction and stigmatization.
... Hygiene discourses stem from moralizing campaigns, previous to the discovery of microorganisms, which attributed illness to uncleanliness (Martin, 1994;Lupton, 2012). Hygiene campaigns supported by visual aids, such as posters and postcards, are an often studied topic in the social analysis of epidemics, such as syphilis or AIDS (Cooter and Stein, 2010;Bastos, 2011;Hamilton, 2019). This tool of public health exhorts individuals to take responsibility for their own bodies to maintain health and prevent disease (Lupton, 2012). ...
... Hygiene discourses stem from moralizing campaigns, previous to the discovery of microorganisms, which attributed illness to uncleanliness (Martin, 1994;Lupton, 2012). Hygiene campaigns supported by visual aids, such as posters and postcards, are an often studied topic in the social analysis of epidemics, such as syphilis or AIDS (Cooter and Stein, 2010;Bastos, 2011;Hamilton, 2019). This tool of public health exhorts individuals to take responsibility for their own bodies to maintain health and prevent disease (Lupton, 2012). ...
This article aims to contribute to the understanding of the social dimensions of the 2020 pandemic, with a particular emphasis on the visual practices of science communication in times of health emergency, by analyzing how the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is being visually represented. It seeks to identify the format and content of images used to illustrate online information about the pandemic, in particular, from websites of policy institutions, research promoters, and media in Portugal and Spain. By examining a sample containing 600 images, it aims to identify the messages being conveyed and the effects these images intend to provoke and to illuminate the differences in representations among the three sources of communication. Differences and similarities with visual images of previous pandemics (influenza, AIDS) are examined. This article ascertains that policy websites aim to be mostly prescriptive, relying on infographics to convey prevention and care instructions to its audiences. On the other hand, science websites rely mostly on stock photos and images from scientific articles to illustrate current research, while newspaper websites are the most diversified in terms of the images they use and the topics they cover. This study concludes that representations of science are still very much based on stereotypical imagery of labs and white coats, that representations of the medical side of the pandemic are focused on images of intensive care that aim to generate fear and stimulate responsible behavior, and that the social aspects of the pandemic are illustrated by images that focus either on pandemic prevention (e.g., washing hands) or on the impacts of the pandemic itself (e.g., empty streets during lockdown).
... To address such issues, this article focuses on some of the visual materials produced as part of these campaigns and how they were received. Such an approach has provided a fruitful line of analysis for historians of other public health issues (Cooter & Stein, 2010;Hand, 2017;Medcalf & Nunes, 2018). It is especially pertinent here for two reasons. ...
Until the 1980s, anti-drug education campaigns in the UK were rare. This article examines the reasons behind a policy shift that led to the introduction of mass media drug education in the mid 1980s. It focuses on two campaigns. ‘Heroin Screws You Up’ ran in England, and ‘Choose Life Not Drugs’ ran in Scotland. The campaigns were different in tone, with ‘Heroin Screws You Up’ making use of fear and ‘shock horror’ tactics, whereas ‘Choose Life Not Drugs’ attempted to deliver a more positive health message. ‘Heroin Screws You Up’ was criticised by many experts for its stigmatising approach. ‘Choose Life Not Drugs’ was more favourably received, but both campaigns ran into difficulties with the wider public. The messages of these campaigns were appropriated and deliberately subverted by some audiences. This historical policy analysis points towards a complex and nuanced relationship between drug education campaigns and their audiences, which raises wider questions about health education and its ‘publics’.
... Despite the recognition of posters as an effective technology of public health by health authorities themselves (e.g., Centres for Disease Control, 1994;World Health Organization, 2009), the public health campaign poster has not received the range and diversity of scholarly attention that it merits (see also Cooter & Stein, 2010). In part, this is because when scholars have recognized the value in studying the symbolic and cultural dimensions of disease, the dominance of the paradigm of the "representations of" disease has led to a privileging of varied forms of ideological critiques and a focus on the press as the primary cultural site (see discussion in Brown et al., 2009). ...
... The literature on HIV/AIDS posters, while specific to that particular pandemic, does consider the broader cultural work that those posters do (see Cooter & Stein, 2009Gilman, 1995;Heller, 2011;Hunter, 2004;Hunter & LaCroix, 2016;Johnny & Mitchell, 2006;McDonnell, 2010;Oyebode & Unuabonah, 2013;Pelling, 2001;Treichler, 1999). Inspired by this scholarship, and drawing in particular on Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein's (2009Stein's ( , 2010Stein & Cooter, 2011) work, this article explores the ways in which handwashing posters operate as communication artefacts, rather than as public health tools. These posters bear the traces of their emergence in the current pandemic culture and adopt particular modes and forms that tell us much about how we are making sense of disease, our bodies, and our environment. ...
... Analysts must attend not only to what the images convey, in aesthetic or semantic terms, but where they occur, the cultural forms of address they mobilize, the nature of viewers' consumption of them, and their existence as highly ephemeral material objects. A blend of imagery and text, meant to be read quickly (often while viewers are on the move), public health posters typically employ a single message aimed at encouraging an identifiable change in behaviour in the viewer (Cooter & Stein, 2010). William H. Helfand (2010) frames the poster as a change medium: "the integrated words and illustrations [are] designed to persuade the viewer to change certain behaviours" (p. ...
Background Public health posters exhorting viewers to wash their hands to prevent the spread of communicable disease are common in airports, shopping malls, hospitals, and workplaces. Yet the poster remains understudied by scholars working in communication, health, and governance.
Analysis Analyzing a large corpus of Canadian public health posters targeting handwashing, this article identifies three themes: the articulation of an embodied pedagogy aimed at daily practices; the recognition of our body surfaces and those of people and things around us as contaminated skins; and the production of haptic visuality.
Conclusion and implications These posters promote a habitus of hygiene, inviting us to modify our haptic etiquette, to see, know, and inhabit our bodies differently, and to imagine and interact with our environment on new terms.
... Researchers like Ostherr and others who focus on the visual culture of disease in public health campaigns (Bashford, 2004;Cooter & Stein, 2010;Ostherr, 2002Ostherr, , 2005Serlin, 2010), on representations of disease and diseased bodies in art and medical imagery (Clarke, 2010;Gilman, 1988;van Dijck, 2006) and on representations of disease in popular culture and online sites (Cohen & Shafer, 2004;Marchessault & Sawchuk, 2000;Oudshoorn & Somers, 2007) highlight the extent to which visual health information is a central feature of subjective engagement in modern life. The role of the vi-sual culture of disease in photojournalism, however, remains an understudied field. ...
Background Examining press coverage of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, this article analyzes the work of the hazmat suit as a visual signifier of disease.
Analysis Hazmat imagery from Africa operated to make the disease visible, both “othering” it and contributing to fantasies of containment. In American imagery, the suit became a figure of biosecurity and reassurance, while also connoting the prospect of American “diseaseability.”
Conclusion and implications African hazmat imagery reinforced pre-existing schema for understanding Ebola within a news category while American imagery straddled the boundary between the geography of disease fear and the imagined immunological community, potentially destabilizing press narratives of reassurance.
... 14 Posters were soon deployed for other uses though, and while those delivering public health messages were rare before the First World War, after this period they were increasingly used to communicate messages around issues such as tuberculosis, venereal disease and alcoholism. 15 Far from neutral texts, Cooter and Stein assert that the public health poster 'moralizes behavior, guiding the viewer to a clear notion of what is or is not socially acceptable.' 16 Posters did not simply speak for themselves. 17 As Gilman reminds us, the vocabulary of posters was complex and contradictory, open to multiple readings that changed over time and place. ...
This article discusses the production and dissemination of the emotive and informative messages promoting polio vaccination registration in Britain from 1956–1962 through the lens of public health press advertisements and posters. It argues that as the press reported on the problems which beset the vaccine campaign, and the various publics who could register for the polio vaccination multiplied, the campaign’s content changed. Material was adapted to target the presumed emotional and educational needs of newly eligible publics. The article contends that by attending to the emotional content of this campaign, the variety of publics envisioned by the producers may be examined.
... Whilst these have attracted some attention from historians, including an influential chapter by Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein, our focus on germs and their significance enables us to move beyond the materials themselves to uncover attitudes towards and understanding of infection, hygiene, personal responsibility and gender dynamics. 15 As Martina King has summarised, 'scholarly work on the "politics of bacteriology" has made it evident that the longstanding stereotype of the evil, menacing, invading, anthropomorphic germ in the 20 th and 21 st centuries originates around 1900'. 16 Whilst the status of German bacteriologists as 'microbe hunters' around this period might explain the emergence of such a phenomenon, a number of key questions remain outstanding. ...
The development of germ theories of disease was reliant on the exchange of representations and descriptions of microorganisms. Visual properties were critical in establishing a shared understanding of agents of disease and their causal role. However, historians have yet to explore in detail the representation of microorganisms aimed at audiences beyond specialists. The public visual culture of germs offers a new window through which to understand health campaigns, their motivations, and intended audiences. We argue that still and moving images of germs made visible social anxieties surrounding health, race, class, and national security in ways not yet recognised.
Background
We discuss the aesthetics of grotesque transparency in public health communication campaigns and health-related social marketing initiatives, and its strategic and ethical implications.
Methods
Some emblematic cases are discussed illustrating the relevance of the grotesque transparency strategy.
Results
These case studies show aesthetical and emotional considerations that public health scholars and professionals should carefully consider in the context of an expansive visual culture driven by digital communications. They also indicate that with the advent of technologies that expand the capabilities of manipulating and diffusing images the role of the transparently grotesque is more prevalent in public health and social marketing initiatives.
Discussion
The study of grotesque transparency is particularly important when facing emerging global public health challenges, such as pandemics and climate change-related health issues, in a disruptive communication ecosystem.
This chapter examines the petri dish posters of the Saskatchewan Health Authority’s Germ Smart hand hygiene campaign, arguing that the posters work as emplaced vital media. After a brief consideration of the poster as a unique public health medium and a survey of some of the scholarly literature examining the efficacy of hand hygiene poster campaigns, the chapter examines both the posters’ messages and their conditions of production and circulation. The analysis posits that this line of posters is on the cutting edge of contemporary visual health messaging that both incorporates diseased environment into production and design and hones viewers’ somatic attention as media operating in the haptic visual register.
