Postmarked Real Photo Postcards 1907 - 1927
May 19 - July 2, 2004
installation images selected works thumbnails
Press Release
A national postcard boom began at the beginning of the 20th century. Real Photo Postcards, a tiny subset of this postcard craze, were popularized by Kodak's introduction of an affordable, easy-to-use portable, folding pocket camera in 1906: its images were printed in black and white directly onto thick, sepia-toned card stock with pre-printed postcard-designated backs; the camera's postcard-sized negatives gave the printed images themselves actual photographs--greater clarity in contrast with the vast majority of postcard images otherwise composed of small dot patterns printed on a lithographic press.
The postcards in this exhibition, Postmarked: Photo Postcards 1907-1927 are selections from the collection of New York-based artist, Harvey Tulcensky. This presentation does not set out to tell a general history of Real Photo Postcards, but rather to speak about particularities and unique properties of particular Real Photo Postcards. In keeping with this spirit, a select group of 45 arresting examples were chosen (from a collection of over 3000 cards), pointing towards the idiosyncratic poignancy and piercing wonder of this neglected class of vernacular photographic messages.
Snapshots were intended, for the most part, as private commemorations, but Real Photo Postcards, on the other hand, also supported other purposes: to engage brief communication over long distances, especially significant in the pre-telephone era. Modest, idiosyncratic, and above all, unique, Real Photo Postcards retain a special access to particular time-bound messages, especially when the sender was also the photographer; the postmark on the address side of the card, however, does not cancel their uncanny power to deliver their arresting registrations of the here-and-now to the present viewer. These are not impersonal, official views but rather, idiosyncratic messages whose passing impressions of passing things pierce us with the particularity of what Roland Barthes describes as a photographs "punctum."-- (Excerpted from the essay Real Photo Postcards: Passing Thoughts On Passing Things, by Todd Alden written for this exhibition).
Postmarked - Real Photo Postcards 1907 - 1927