In today’s world, a poster is many things. It can be a celebrity pinup you tear out of a magazine, an ad you see on the subway, a reproduction of a famous artwork you hang in your dorm room, a promotion for a concert on the side of a building, a notice from the Department of Health showing you how to perform the Heimlich Maneuver in a restaurant, a plea to vote or not vote for a particular candidate—the list is endless. In its most basic form, though, a poster is a temporary promotion of an idea, product, or event put up in a public space for mass consumption.
A poster is not high art. Unlike a painting you see in a museum, a poster isn’t unique—hundreds or thousands of copies of a given image would have been printed and disseminated around a city or country, allowing for tens of thousands of viewers to come in contact with it before it would be destroyed through weather, vandalism, or simply by being covered by the next ad. Unlike the Mona Lisa that has survived hundreds of years, a poster would sometimes only be seen for a few days or even hours before it would disappear, most likely forever. As the height of the poster craze happened in an era before photography, we have very little record of many of the designs created—in fact, the only posters that do survive are parts of the printing run that were never displayed in the first place.
