The war child: childhood as it appears in photographs in publications for Republican combatants during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)

Throughout the Spanish Civil War, visual media in the press played a special role on the side of the Republicans. Photographs of children in various situations were used to report on what was happening and also to influence the public opinion both locally and abroad. In this article, we analyse a specific subset of the enormous quantity of visual media that was published during the war: that which was created specifically for combatants in what is generally referred to as military press. More than two hundred such publications were found. Our aim is to determine what use was made of images that include children, and after compiling an inventory and choosing from among the articles and/or reports that incorporate the use of such images, we analysed the iconography that was constructed, presenting concrete examples. We found that, via iconographic resources and elements, photographs of childhood were used more for propaganda than to show any specific reality.