Abstract: Photography and PropagandaToday, the word 'propaganda' has negative connotations, often linked with manipulation and misuse of information.However, in the first few decades of the 20th century, it was understood as a structured process that used information to promote goals and drum up support.In this sense, it dealt with the control and transmission of information to an inter ested audience via the media. 1 The media in question is often, but not always, the mass media, as shaped by various political, cultural and profit-related interests. 2Indeed, photography is basically information.As the French cultural critic Roland Barthes might have put it -photojournalism is a message defined by its information source, transmitter, channel, receiver and destination. 3 From this perspective, the information source would be the members of a newspaper or magazine editorial board, the transmission channel would be the medium itself, and the receiver the audience. 4 If we apply such a sys tem to Partisan photography, we could say that the information source is the photo grapher, war photography unit or cultural unit, the editorial board of a certain newspaper, the prin ting house or the photography and propaganda department.The transmission channels are Partisan newspapers.In these newspapers it was supremely difficult to publish highquality photographic reproductions.Consequently, it was more common to see news boards containing clippings (photography alongside headlines and subheadings) or the developed prints of the photographs themselves. 5And while other contemporary authors such as Allan Sekula have claimed that photography cannot be observed alone outside the context in which it is distributed, here the entire context underpinning the function of Partisan photography and its messages must be laid bare.This is because we are not speaking here of newspaper editorial offices with a staff of photographers and editors at work in comfortable conditions.Instead, we are dealing with printing presses found mainly in hideouts in forests or in liberated towns and villages.Not infrequently, the photographers were also acting alone. 5.