Hand sanitizer, food sterilizers, 24/7 contamination alerts — in our hyper-germophobic Internet age, it’s hard to imagine when it took high-potency posters to spread word about infectious disease.
“An Iconography of Contagion,” new on view at the National Academy of Sciences on C Street, unrolls a couple dozen posters illustrating the dangers of tuberculosis, malaria, venereal diseases, AIDS and other health threats.
These specimens from around the world demonstrate art’s ability to arrest attention, mainline a message and incite action: Watch out! Wash your hands! Cover your mouth! Get that checked out!
In the past, shame and fear kept many people mum about symptoms. A well-placed poster served as both siren and counsel. Collectively these paper sentries slowed the spread of disease.
To compete with billboards, comics, tabloids, cartoons, pulp fiction, Hollywood and then television, public health officials harnessed modernist design, abstract art, dramatic lighting and the kinds of edgy perspectives seen in Hitchcock films and fashion photography.
“The designers and artists who were recruited for such campaigns came out of the same commercial visual culture,” said Michael Sappol, the National Library of Medicine historian who curated the exhibition. “They devised a new iconography of contagion that emphasized visual legibility and the pleasure of the view.”
That iconography is rife with skulls, skeletons and shadows. Happy faces later diluted the icon gene pool, spawning more affable Mr. Yuck stickers.
Poster designs span Dada-esque to erotic film promo knockoffs. In a Danish illustration, a rotund comic character sneezes in the theater. That “Atisch” might ignite an epidemic! A soldier looks into a mirror, sees a skeleton. “BEWARE! Drink only approved water.” Wartime campaigns linked foes with disease-carriers; a sneering mosquito’s wings bear the Japanese rising sun flag. “Man-Made Malaria!”
Sometimes the goal is to debunk alarmist notions — “Don’t worry what you’ll pick up at work” headlines a 1980s poster aimed at those terrified of getting AIDS from office-mates.
In one film-noir selection from Great Britain, an ominous man-shaped shadow hovers behind a small boy. “Make sure you’re fit to be the Parents of tomorrow’s citizens.”
Don’t delay: “Treatment is free and confidential.”
Treatment for what? You’ll have to go to find out.
(If you go: “An Iconography of Contagion: 20th-Century Health Posters and the Visual Representation of Infectious Disease”; Through Dec. 19; National Academy of Sciences; 2100 C St. NW; free, bring photo I.D.; 202-334-2436; nas.edu. Curator Michael Sappol, a medical historian, will give a free gallery talk from 6 to 8 p.m. Sept. 18, from 6 to 8 p.m. Also on view at NAS: “Coexistence” — paintings by Joan Wadleigh Curran that explore odd mergers between the flotsam of humans and nature.)
