The General Theory of Icebergs or What You Can't See in Polical Advertisements

The author analyzes the the advertising campaigns of the Labour and Conservative Parties during the 1987 British General Election. He notes that both Parties used the whole spectrum of the press media for their advertising campaign, making no difference between popular or highbrow newspapers as is usual for normal advertising. The author interpretes this "nationwide" policy as a means of aiming at nationalist issues. After describing the cultural-economic contexts in which the political advertisements fall, the author analyzes in the second part of this article the photographs used in thecampaigns. Most of the photographs used by Labour advertsing are posed
"straight documentary" photographs (for example of a mugging). The mode of representation used in Labour's advertising campaign is compared with the hard-hitting photojournalism of the Daily Mirror (the only national paper supporting Labour). The author shows how the photographs in Labour's campaign depict "misery", evoking the pre-war, reformist mode of signifying discontent, iniquity and injustice. "The question is whether or not an outworn style ( ) one virtually abandoned even by the charities is powerful enough to defeat the inertia of the vaguely concerned". The author concludes that documentary realism if used in a national campaign is relatively useless. Tory advertising,on the other hand, used isolated and iconic images (of pensioners, babies, doctors), a mode of representation with a more powerful typographic impact.
Citaten: Roland Barthes