I went to a coffee hut tonight to work on a paper I'm writing, and while waiting for the bathroom, this ad caught my eye.
Powerful graphic, but where have I seen that before?
Try Birmingham, Alabama, 1963.
Please tell me it's unintentional. But how could it be? Is there any other setting where fire hoses get used for anything but putting out fires?
Addendum: There's an interesting back and forth on FaceBook about this ad here.
Wow, that's some scary visual literacy you've got there, Bill. And did it occur to nobody how easily neg men will reinterpret the anthropomorphisation of HIV?
ReplyDeleteI immediately had the same reaction/thought - Birmingham. That is definately the message but why is beyond me.
ReplyDeleteSue
This isn't the first time I've seen the virus anthropomorphized and depicted as black.
ReplyDeleteMy marketing lenses detect a hint of a parallel between the HIV Vaccine and cologne. Isn't the word clean in the common lexicon to mean HIV-negative?
ReplyDelete