Sign of Our Times

Those of us boomers who are wistfully pushing 50 (and those who've pushed past it) can at least feel cool that we're in hip company: The chicken-leg-in-a-circle Peace Sign turns 50 this year too. As part of the celebration, National Geographic has brought out a groovy little photo book called Peace: The Biography of a Symbol.

As noted in a Time magazine piece and other advance press, this book insightfully traces the origins of this humble logo design by British textile designer Gerald Holtom through its modern prevalence throughout the peace-loving world. Compiled by photographer-writer Ken Kolsbun and author Michael S. Sweeney, the book also does much more — it serves as a clear, fact-laden, mostly non-dogmatic history lesson on the entire Peace Movement.

Though the book opens with photos such as the above 2005 shot of a Hungarian crowd protesting the Iraq War, its historic time-line begins with the fallout from nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. This provided the seed for the nuclear-disarmament movement that took shape during the Cold War. With shots of school children in emergency-drill gas masks and Soviet missile parades, the book summarizes the 1950s climate of fear and loathing that led to the Peace Sign's birth as a symbol for nuclear disarmament (the symbol blends the semaphore letters for "N" and "D"), then traces its adoption by the 1960s anti-war movement, Greenpeace, No Nukes, and others.

Interspersed are many of the era's iconic photographs — such as hippies sticking flowers in National Guard rifles in 1967, Woodstock Nation in 1969, the Kent State riots in 1970 — as well as Kolsbun's extensive photo collection of the Peace Symbol itself. Not to mention essays on such cultural spokespersons as Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Lennon, with a recent view of Central Park's Imagine mosaic (right) typically decked out in peace flowers.

For all its recounting of world conflicts and cultural schisms, this book is a predominantly hopeful document of the power of suggestion and activism, borne by a little graphic symbol over the decades. It ends with modern permutations such as the tear-gas canister grouping below on the endlessly conflict-ridden West Bank. All we are saying is give Peace a glance. — Jack Crager

Comments

[Adam Maas]

Actually, the logo is at least 65 years old. It's only as a 'Peace Logo' that it turns 50.

The 3rd Panzer Division used the symbol for a short period in WW2 as its recognition symbol painted on its vehicles.