Fingers of Fate - The Tightening Grip

Unknown

ca. 1916 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

During World War I, European postcard publishers used photomontage to fan the flames of patriotism on both sides of the conflict. A postcard issued in Munich in 1914 shows a towering German infantryman pounding together the heads of three soldiers of the Triple Entente—France, England, and Russia—in what the caption calls a “powerful collision.” A few years later, an English publisher countered with a card on which a giant hand, its wrist and fingernails adorned with official portraits of the Allied leaders, crushes Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II in a “tightening grip.”

Artist

Unknown

Date

ca. 1916

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2010