This graphics style is quite distinctive. I wish books, ads and even magazines would adopt it instead of crafting special effects in Photoshop. Disappearance of artist-made drawings is really unfortunate, especially in such categories as children books.
Art style is a great selling point for me personally. I often find my self reading articles on The New Yorker or Nautilus, not only because the content seems interesting, but because the accompanying graphic makes me intrigued even more. So when I see look at these posters, I try to take in the full message; something more than just the propaganda.
> It's like saying "many people don't expect books to be proof-read, when most are".
It's not. Books are written by humans. You expect them to contain fiction or opinion. Pictures are taken by mechanical equipment with no agenda. "The camera never lies" etc. Obviously you can also stage a photograph unrepresentative of reality using techniques other than Photoshop, but the general expectation is that what you see in a photograph is what you would have seen with your own eyes if you had been there at the time.
But people also blame Photoshop when the problem is endemic. Only people with certain body types are hired in Hollywood. Then they have professional makeup artists and hair stylists make them up like a plastic doll, and then the pictures are photoshopped.
I suspect a big part of the reason the criticism is rarely taken seriously is that the proposed alternative of "normal" people is so obviously the wrong one. The average American is overweight and doesn't get enough exercise. People aren't going to want to look at that or be inspired to look like that, nor should they be. But the concept that the represented ideal physical appearance should resemble real athletes rather than stick figures or couch potatoes doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone.
There are a great many choices made between photons striking the sensor and photons from your computer screen striking your eyes. In the absence of Photoshop, they're made by an engineering team's best guess at a general procedure for transforming the raw electrical data into a photorealistic scene, but these algorithms do not have a special claim on the truth and the parameters they choose are not necessarily "right." In some situations (such as rooms with unusual color-temperature light sources) they are unambiguously wrong.
Professionals use Photoshop when they disagree with the choices made by the on-camera chip, which is almost all of the time. Working from RAW, you can start fresh from something closer to raw sensor data and move the sliders for yourself. But those sliders have to be somewhere, effectively, and taking manual control of them (or overriding them with further transformations) doesn't make a photo less real. It's much more like copy-editing.
Most images you see are Photoshopped, but most of the editing (and all of the editing in journalism) is done with the intention of making the photo a more accurate representation of what the photographer saw.
Where you get people editing photos to make them more than what was really there is in art. Ansel Adams made choices in the darkroom motivated by aesthetics rather than accuracy, and he was damn good at it. I'm sure most glamour photographers would tell you they're engaged in a similar kind of artistry.
I'm less interested in fashion magazines creating unrealistic representations of the human form than why people believe these are credible ideals to aspire to, rather than mildly amusing curiosities.
The Photoshop manipulation has very little distortion — the camera engineer could not have produced these images, and the intention is entirely to make the image /less/ like what the photographer saw.
(It isn't just women. Yesterday's junk catalogue is illustrated with perfect-looking children and teenagers, sometimes with perfect-looking parents.)
[Edited links, I pasted them the wrong way around.]
There a different kinds of photography. And in any case, the reality is somehow subjective, even our color perception differs, so how can you say which version is "true".
Anyway, in many cases photographer's task is to show the others something the way he sees it, not necessarily the way it "is".
My other point is, that some photoshopping is just a routine of preparing the product, some digital hygiene if you want.
Awesome and very patriotic posters.
In post-USSR countries every child knows who are Y. Gagarin, S. Korolev and V. Tereshkova.
I think not only in post-USSR.
I didn't know who Korolev was until I watched a series[1] the BBC did about him and his Western Counterpart, Wernher von Braun. I knew since I was a kid who Gagarin was of course, from being the first man in space, but I don't believe it was ever mentioned in history class while in school (I just happened to read a lot on my own).
Sadly, we barely even touch on NASA astronauts in school in the United States anymore. I just happen to love history and had parents that also did. I live in Neil Armstrong's home state and if you're ever in Ohio, there's a pretty interesting (and free) museum in his home town about his life and the Apollo Missions.
I don't remember ever learning about Gagarin in school, growing up in Russia. But I knew it none-the-less, because his statue always greeted me whenever I left my apartment.
Tereshkova was a forced achievement of the Soviet space program. She was indeed the first woman in space, but the flight went so infamously bad that it prompted Korolev to put in place a ban on any further women cosmonauts - ban that hold while he was alive and then almost some 20 years after.
Without intending to liken the USSR to Nazi Germany, the Nazis also had very "green" policies. Why suggest that conservation on the early soviet model should be revisited when in fact you just want conservation, but for different reasons and from a different kind of state?
What I've written doesn't sound very clear but the point I'm trying to make is that even a misguided state can get some things right. That doesn't mean those things can only be got right by that kind of state, or that we should call for those things to be administered by such a state in perpetuity...
No one said that. Just that the Soviets had useful cultural aspects worth adopting. "We are used to thinking of the Politburo as a group of unimaginative gray bureaucrats, but they were bureaucrats who dared to dream astounding dreams." (http://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declinin...)
Both the US and former Soviet Union are culturally backwards in many ways, but each has aspects worth learning from. One can easily think of societies improved beyond both "theirs & ours," which also unleash imagination.
I'd guess it's a wee bit difficult to provide that: [saying this as a designer/illustrator with a deep interest in the subject] Soviet design inherited rules from artists involved at the start of the revolution, and was formalised via government-run technical schools and propaganda bureaus, so there was a constant stream of highly public stuff in this style, which covered print, architecture, products etc. In the US, bar propaganda during the war, there was never close to the same formal propaganda structure, so though there are are isolated examples, it was always more ad hoc: good design/illustration was always commercial (as a side note, classic sci-fi/popular mechanics covers were very heavily informed by Soviet space propaganda posters). Closest you'd get is probably postage stamps. NASA has some stuff archived, but it's not the same, it's just prosaic designs with stuff like a photo of the crew of a mission. I assume it wasn't promoted with the same religious fervour in the US, no creation of secular ikons
That one is lovely; A3 with reasonable printing. I'm a bit surprised there aren't more books. The posters cover a wide range of propaganda - including public health.
http://i.imgur.com/R6ouayv.jpg
is not just showing some random "elongated triangle".
The monument to "The Conquerors of Space" in Moscow (completed earlier):
http://i.imgur.com/7f6KY7r.jpg