Running Water

In the 1930s, much of rural America lacked electricity, power, and running water. The Rural Electrification Administration hired graphic designer Lester Beall to create a series of posters illustrating the benefits of electrification. These posters are from the first of three series, created in 1937. The original posters are held in the Lester Beall Archive, at RIT Cary Graphic Arts Collection.

If we look at the literature on Beall, we find the following answers, which have shapedthe generalities of MOMA’s explanation of the posters and their impact on large-scaletechnological reform. Two book-length studies of Beall’s graphic design briefy discussthe REA posters. Both observe that the posters increased ‘public awareness of the ben-efts of electricity’, and that they were ‘appropriate for an audience with minimal read-ing skills’.

3

The latter assertion paraphrases an earlier argument for the general style of the pictographic posters, ‘because the audience [. . .] had limited reading skills, thesesimple but visually dramatic posters express their messages in primary graphic terms’.

The above remarks seem so full of meaning that it is too easy to overlook their ambi-guities. Impressionistic in nature, these observations are best guesses that do very littleto interrogate the style of visualization at the point when it met the visual sensitivity of a public, or the style of bureaucratic visual communications and rural visual reception.

...