John Heartfield

The Hand Has Five Fingers, Communist Party (KPD) election poster, 1928 An outsized, grasping worker's hand pushes straight out at the viewer, and the slogan does the rest: five fingers, list number five, vote Communist. There is no candidate face and no program, just one photographic gesture carrying the whole argument. Heartfield took the directness of commercial advertising and turned it to political persuasion, which is why the poster is still taught as the template for the single-image, single-idea campaign poster. Look at how the hand's scale and tight crop make the number impossible to forget.