Hoarded

I’ve posted about the Empire Marketing Board posters before, both the ideological problem that they present, and their rather special hoardings.

I can’t even remember why I was searching for them again the other day, but in doing so, I turned up something I’ve never seen before, which is this.

It looks like some kind of contemporaneous photograph of an Empire Marketing Board billboard, with posters in place.  (This isn’t an ideal format for the blog, so do click on the image to enlarge it a bit).  But I have no real idea where it came from as it was on a forum with no provenance at all.

I can tell you however that the posters on there are by McKnight Kauffer and date from 1926.  The one on the right was sold at the last Onslows auction.

It went for £800, which is quite a lot of money, especially for something which is quite arguably racist.

And thanks to the Canadian archives that I mentioned in my previous post, I can also show you not just the other pictorial poster.

But also the two text posters as well.

All that’s missing is the banner along the top, so you’ll just have to imagine that.

My searches also uncovered this Kauffer, which I have never seen before.

And perhaps that’s not a surprise, because it not simply racist but imperialist and exploitative to a degree that is really quite shocking today.  All the more reason to look at it really.  Perhaps it needs to be in a few more books.