Q. And babies? A. And babies.

This print was published in 1970 by the Art Worker's Coalition, an organization of activists during the U.S.' involvement in the Vietnam war. Dougherty, Hendricks, and Petlin were involved in the design of this poster and Ron Haeberle, a war photographer, captured this scene of women and and children laying dead on a pathway. 

Haeberle captured this scene, which was part of the My Lai Massacre, an event in which U.S. soldiers murdered hundreds of unarmed civilians. The Art Workers Coalition would end up distributing more than 50,000 free posters  at protests and other gatherings to expose the U.S. government's intentional erasure of their war crimes during the Vietnam War era. 

The text comes overlapping the photo comes from an interview of Paul Meadlo, a participant in the massacre, and his response to the interviewer's question, “And babies?”

The visual erasure of certain media and iconography is a common practice in the United States. It indicates a larger issue in the construction of the American narrative and the stories of the systemically oppressed. 

This poster's production and distribution of the My Lai Massacre is an example of how war propaganda has drastically changed in the course of a century, steering a clear emphasis onto public consciousness and accepting the reality of war atrocities. 

This is in stark contrast to war propaganda of the 1940s to 50s, in which the American narrative of the all-american dream, of the nuclear family, was incredibly sanatized and excluded the visual rhetoric of racial minorities. 

When we analyze the visual progression of war propaganda and how it's depiction of people alludes to a filtering of narratives, we can open further discussion into how intentional exposure/suppression can work as a leveraging device.