World AIDS Day 2013: Launch of AIDS awareness poster gallery on Flickr

To complement last night's excellent talk on the HIV/AIDS posters at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, the archives has created an online gallery of  HIV/AIDS posters within our collection on Flickr, Global Visions: HIV/AIDS posters at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine archives. The posters provide a snapshot of the diversity of designs and messages used in AIDS public awareness campaigns across Europe.

The majority of the posters were collected as part of the European Commission (EC) 'Concerted Action on Assessment of AIDS/HIV Prevention Strategies' project, 1989-1991, the purpose of which was to compare and contrast the different AIDS public health campaigns European countries. It was during the late eighties and early nineties that AIDS was a major concern to European countries as the number of cases rapidly increased and there was a high degree of anxiety and fear in the general population over this fatal disease.

Poster from 1989 the Swiss 'Stop AIDS' campaign that ran from 1987-1995, the poster translates as 'Without? Without me" and was one of a number of designs used to promote the use of condoms 

The posters show how public health campaigners and voluntary organisations tried to inform and change behaviour within the general community. The posters display a number of different strategies to convey their message, such as using cartoons to depict risky behaviour for conservative audiences; targeting an emotion response through the use of fear, humour and empowerment and positively representing at risk groups to de-stigmatise and counter misinformation about the disease.