In 2002 Manchester Metropolitan University were awarded over £300,000 by the Arts and Humanities Research Board to work in partnership with the Imperial War Museum on a three-year project to catalogue, digitally photograph and publish online 10,000 posters from the Museum's internationally important collection. This project was successfully concluded in 2006.

The Museum’s poster collection is the largest and most comprehensive of its type in Britain, documenting the social, political, ethnic and cultural aspirations of various nations from the First World War to more recent conflicts. The project has opened up a large proportion of the poster collection to academic, curatorial and general audiences for the first time. 

More about the Project

The project focussed on British, Commonwealth and Western European posters from the First World War, Interwar and Second World War.

British posters digitised include recruiting posters issued 1914 -1916 such as Alfred Leete's famous Lord Kitchener design, as well as material related to civilian experience. Highlights from the Second World War are images by well-known poster designers such as Abram Games and Fougasse (C K Bird).

The European area of the collection contains First World War posters by notable designers such as Ludwig Höhlwein and Lucian Bernhard from Germany, Biro from Austria-Hungary and French posters by Abel Faivre, Lucien Jonas and Poulbot. Later material includes posters from Germany's post-war revolutionary period, the rise of National Socialism and occupied Europe during the Second World War.

The images and data from the project are available for reference through IWM Collections On-line and the AHDS Visual Arts Database. Future plans include online sale of high resolution images for reproduction, but in the meantime reproduction requests should be directed to artimages@iwm.org.uk

The Museum is continuing to document and digitise areas of the collection not encompassed by the project: substantial holdings of American posters from the First and Second World Wars, a small collection of Russian posters from both world wars, including some ROSTA and TASS posters, and the post-1945 element of the collection which covers anti-war protest from Vietnam to Iraq, material from Northern Ireland, and anti-nuclear and other cold war related material.