Visual Culture and Health Posters

Title:: "It's Time to Tell Your Kids about the Birds and the Bees. And AIDS" [image 2]

(high resolution jpg) High resolution version (3,808,151 Bytes)

Description:

This poster is part of a series of three that illustrate two common shifts in the themes of HIV/AIDS posters in the late 1980s and early 1990s: (1) targeting specific racial or ethnic communities by using different photographic subjects to personalize the disease; and (2) juxtaposing text and image to dispel myths about at-risk populations. The three children with similarly uneasy expressions could easily be advertising cough medicine or breakfast cereal. The viewer would likely be surprised to learn from the text that this is a public service ad for HIV/AIDS education. By using the images of attentive children, the posters challenge parents to overcome existing taboos, suggesting they have a responsibility to educate their children about HIV/AIDS. The message also normalizes the controversial advice offered by Surgeon General C. Everett Koop in his report on HIV/AIDS issued in 1986, which suggested that since education was the best and only strategy of prevention, and since HIV/AIDS was spread primarily through sex, school children should receive sex education. In this context, the expectant faces on the children alongside the imploring passage suggest that parents have a moral duty to educate their children.

NOTE: Slide of original poster image is blurry.

Number of Image Pages:

1 (501,893 Bytes)

Date Supplied:

ca. 1989

Creator:

Brogan and Partners

Source:

Original Repository: The History of Medicine Division. Prints and Photographs Collection.

This image may also be accessed from the Images from the History of Medicine (IHM).

URL: http://wwwihm.nlm.nih.gov/

IHM Order Number: A025171

Publisher:

Brogan and Partners

Rights:

Reproduced with permission of Brogan and Partners.

Subject:

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH):: HIV; Public Health

Visual Culture and Public Health Keywords:: Target Populations

Exhibit Category:

HIV/AIDS

Relation:

"It's Time to Tell Your Kids about the Birds and the Bees. And AIDS" [image 1] [ca. 1989]

"It's Time to Tell Your Kids about the Birds and the Bees. And AIDS" [image 3] [ca. 1989]

Unique Identifier:

VCBBGD

Document Type:

Posters

Slides (photographs)

Language:

English

Format:

image/jpeg

image/tif

Physical Condition:

Poor

Metadata Last Modified Date:

2004-08-13

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