Albanian Poster

Looking for the propaganda image

This book condenses a several year’s research efforts about the propaganda poster in twentieth century Albania. Unluckily, posters had a very short lifespan; for the most part they vanished with the ideologies that inspired them, but also as a result of the recurrent fluctuations in the political conjunctures of the dictatorial regime that made them useless. Very few samples are conserved in public archives, such as the National Library fund and the Central State Archive.

With the dissolution of the socialist order, many specimens – previously stored in the warehouses and archives of the former propaganda printing presses – were destroyed or thrown in the garbage. Even the first propaganda images, among the most beautiful and significant, produced with the old technology of lithography, were lost forever. Very little of the poster of the years 1940-60 may have survived, only thanks to the efforts of local and foreign collectors, that enable us today this comparison, this juxtaposition, this special approach with the initial image of propaganda and the propagandist.

The premise of this book is the analysis of iconology, the tradition of the image that lays behind a poster, as well as the discernment of variations that occurred in this tradition, as a result of ideological changes in twentieth century Albania.

In this analysis we will treat the origin of the poster as a model of mass communication, as well as its evolution in the planned information systems, which are conventionally named: republic, monarchy, fascism, World War II and communism.

Despite the fact that the main focus of research in this book is the propaganda poster during the dictatorship period, 1945–1990, in the so-called “People’s Republic”, and later “Socialist Republic of Albania”, the history of this pictorial genre in Albania begins earlier. Therefore, a presentation in historical chronology of the propaganda poster will help us to discover the conception, the formal development and the influence that this genre had on the public for which it was created.

Author
Rubens Shima