Dada, Che & Obama Say Trust Me

When I saw the ex-Dadist John Heartfiels’s photomontage cover for the June 1934 issue of the communist magazine AIZ Arrbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ: Workers Illustrated Paper) en titled ‘A New Man – Master of a New World. I was struck how similar the pose was to the picture of Che Guevara on thousands of student walls and T-shirts and Shepherd Fairey’s HOPE poster of Presidential candidate Barrack Obama both have become icons.

John Heartfeild the ex-Dadaist produced a series of monthly photomotages montages
Heartfield positioning the worker as a man of vision in a new age at time of rising unemployment and political strife

See for yourself ,c lick here.

All three have men staring upwards with gravitas as a friend said a calm-assertive "trust me" look.

Having identified the pose the challenge is now to find when the pose was first used. I suspect the Romans may have got their first as they have in so many things; they were the masters at propaganda.

Picture credits

1930s
Plate 5 from
Gaiger, J.M., Wood P. (eds) (2003) Art of the Twentieth Century – A Reader, New Haven and London, Yale University Press

1960s
Alberto Korda took the iconic picture of Che Geuvara on March 5, 1960 while working for the Cuban newspaper Revolución.

2000s
Shepherd Fairey’s 2008 HOPE poster for the Obama presidential campaign was based on a copyrighted photograph taken in April 2006 by Mannie Garcia while on assignment for the Associated Press (AP)