This thesis parts from the premise that avant-garde art collectives produce discourses meant to articulate the opposition to the art/life divide as one that interrelates fields such as aesthetics, politics, philosophy, and even economics. By utilizing a comparative framework, it plays on the complementarity and differences between four 1960s groups that formed very specific organizations directed at challenging society, in one way or another related to the Situationist International: The Situationist Times (France), King Mob Echo (UK), Black Mask and its transformations (US), and S.NOB (Mexico). Through the medium of magazines, they intended to reach a mass audience that in the act of reading and looking at their images and texts would be prompted to discern organizations that undermined the world-system. Thus, the Situationist Times attempted to form a (people’s) movement that in an applied creativity that rejected the metanarrative of progress would be able to realize the malleability of history. King Mob followed a conspiratorial logic with the idea of a dis-organized mass suddenly acting in concert against states. Black Mask and its transformations played with the idea of a war for territory, the occupation of a ‘free zone’ by a community in the midst of a dominated world. Finally, S.NOB’s idiosyncratic anarchism came from an opposition to the totalizing discursive practices of the Mexican Revolution, giving primacy to fragmentation and an anti-organizational bent; while it had no direct relationship to any of the above groups, it shows how their techniques and theories develop out of an engagement with Surrealism and past avant-gardes. S.NOB provides not a counterpoint but a contextual revelation of the limits of these collectives, in the Bataillean sense that opens all of them up to a ‘contamination’ with historicity and thought that treats all of them as equal in scope and importance.

To date, the study of Chinese propaganda photography has been limited. While some research has been made on post-1949 photography, the photographic production of the pre-1949 period has not been sufficiently explored. Focusing on the years of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), this thesis aims at addressing this gap in the literature and at providing an analysis of how the Chinese Communist Party exploited photography for propaganda purposes during the war. Through the images taken by Party-affiliated photographers and printed on the Jin Cha Ji Pictorial, the first Communist photographic propaganda magazine, this study aims to show how this type of visual propaganda aimed not only at narrating the events of the war against Japan, but also at creating a new idea of the Chinese nation. This thesis is divided into four chapters. The first, The Jin Cha Ji Pictorial: A Brief History presents the history of the magazine and the work of the CCP affiliated photographers who contributed to its creation and popularity. Chapter two, The Geography of a Revolution, explores how a new cultural landscape was visually constructed to create the basis of the political legitimation that the CCP needed during wartime. Chapter three, Becoming Modern Women, investigates the symbolic and ideological value of the spinning wheel in 1943 in relation to women’s contribution to the war effort and the thorny issue of women empowerment. Lastly, chapter four, Moulding the Future looks at the visual representation of childhood and discusses the issue of militarisation and masculinisation of childhood during wartime. This study ends with few considerations on the propagandistic, historical and artistic value of Communist propaganda photography during the Second Sino-Japanese War as well as a reflection on how the symbolic and ideological significance of some of the photographs presented here are still recognisable in contemporary Chinese propaganda.