The postcard is losing its luster. As a medium of communication, and as a picture-letter showcasing one’s home or travels abroad, it has fallen victim to the advancements in technology that allow us to send photos instantly. But at the turn of the 20th century, postcards were one of the most popular (and cheapest) ways to document and share the life of your community.
In the new book “Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard, 1905–1930,” photography historian Luc Sante has collected some of the most haunting, moving images from this period. These 122 postcards, also known as “real-photos” because they were created in actual darkrooms and not printing presses, show a side of small-town American communities rarely seen by outsiders. That’s because they were created by and for small-town America.
Millions were made in the brief 25 year period. Their subject matter ranges from candid shots of community picnics by the river, to somber portraits of a family posing stiff and awkwardly in front of their barn. The postcards, at one moment chilling and the next sentimental, are exactly the sort of images that will leave you pondering our nation’s endless history of anonymous artists.
And as the erudite Sante writes in his introduction to the book, they end up giving us a “self-portrait of the American nation.”
The photo postcard is a vast, teeming, borderless body of work that might as well have a single, hydra-headed author, a sort of Homer of the small towns and the prairies. Self-taught and happily ignorant of the history of the medium, this author was free of the sort of second-guessing that cripples artists. He or she was out to do a job, to please a public, to turn a dollar, but also to record things faithfully, to include as many details of a scene as the frame could contain, to hold up a mirror to that bit of the world shared with the clientele, maybe to make the familiar strange, simply by noticing things.
To see more real-photos from the “Folk Photography” collection, and to purchase Sante’s captivating new book, head over to the publisher’s website, YetiPublishing.com.