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Postcards
Ephemeral Histories of Modernity
256 pages | 89 color/107 b&w illustrations | 10.5 x 9.5 | 2010
Cloth edition is not available
ISBN 978-0-271-03528-4 | paper: $65.00
“Meticulously edited and beautifully illustrated, Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity undoubtedly will become the first stop for anyone interested in the cultural history and aesthetics of the postcard. Instead of transforming the postcard into an emblem of a particular understanding of language, these essays explore material histories of the production and reception of postcards across multiple sites in order to grasp their place in histories of modern art and communications technologies, as well as their consequential roles in the increasingly turbulent discursive battles of the early twentieth century over issues such as race, gender, and national identity.” —Mark A. Wollaeger, Vanderbilt University
“This is a stimulating and often brilliant contribution to art history and visual culture studies. The editors have assembled an array of essays that both testify to and analyze in detail the crucial importance of a visual/verbal medium that has long been hidden in plain sight. Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity is exemplary for both its subjects and methods—and, not least, a revelation for anyone who thinks that there is no new ground to be broken in histories of the visual.” —Frederick Bohrer, Hood College
“So ubiquitous that they have been invisible to serious scholarship, postcards have here at last been given the detailed, critical attention they need and deserve. This beautifully designed volume, which covers an admirably diverse range of practices and issues, addresses both the production and reception of the humble postcard, showing this image form to be an especially rich depository of cultural knowledge.” —Geoffrey Batchen, CUNY Graduate Center
“This fascinating collection of essays, well introduced and framed by the editors, marks the arrival of the study of postcards as an important component of the growing field of visual studies. Although the discipline of learning about societies from looking at their postcards has a history that goes back to distinguished earlier practitioners such as the Surrealist poet Paul Éluard and the great American photographer of everyday life, Walker Evans, this book will serve as both a benchmark and an incitement to further study of this valuable archive of cultural traces.” —Herman Lebovics, SUNY Trustees Distinguished Professor, Stony Brook University
Products of modernity, postcards continue to provoke comment today as in the nineteenth century. With their unique status as interdisciplinary image-objects that cross lines of geography, economy, and gender, postcards epitomize the complex history of visual culture. These often sweet, nostalgic, inexpensive mementos of commercial culture have also been carriers, even instigators, of colonialist exoticism and political propaganda. They straddle the by now largely obliterated line between “high” and “low” art, between an earlier modernist art history and more recent work in visual culture. This fully illustrated volume is the first of its kind to bring together the latest interdisciplinary research on postcards as a significant area of scholarly inquiry.
In addition to the editors, the contributors are Rebecca J. DeRoo, Ellen Handy, Elizabeth B. Heuer, Timothy Van Laar, Annelies Moors, Cary Nelson, John O'Brian, Naomi Schor, Kimberly A. Smith, Rachel Snow, Nancy Stieber, and Andrés Mario Zervigón.
David Prochaska is Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône, 1870-1920 (1990, 2004).
Jordana Mendelson is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University and co-editor of Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture, and the Modern Nation, 1929-1939 (Penn State, 2005).
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Jordana Mendelson and David Prochaska
1. Cartes Postales: Representing Paris 1900
Naomi Schor
2. Postcards and the Invention of Old Amsterdam Around 1900
Nancy Stieber
3. Correspondence Here: Real Photo Postcards and the Snapshot Aesthetic
Rachel Snow
4. Postcards to the Front: John Heartfield, George Grosz, and the Birth of Avant-Garde Photomontage
Andres Mario Zervigon
5. Ambivalent Utopia: Franz Marc and Else Lasker-Schlers Primitivist Postcards
Kimberly A. Smith
6. Colonial Collecting: French Women and Algerian Cartes Postales
Rebecca J. DeRoo
7. Presenting People: The Politics of Picture Postcards of Palestine/Israel
Annelies Moors
8. Exhibiting the Museum
David Prochaska
9. Outward and Visible Signs: Postcards and the Art-Historical Canon
Ellen Handy
10. Les plus belles cartes postales
Paul luard
With an introduction by Elizabeth B. Heuer
11. Main Street Looking North from Courthouse Square
Walker Evans
With an introduction by Elizabeth B. Heuer
12. Love Your Panzer Corps: Rediscovering the Wartime Poem Postcard
Cary Nelson
13. Postcard to Moscow
John OBrian
14. Views of the Ordinary and Other Scenic Disappointments
Timothy Van Laar
List of Contributors
Index