Explore the stories behind old travel postcards to spur your wanderlust and open up an interest in their respective cities’ histories and cultures.
Postcards were such an integral part of life during 1900 that nearly any trend, fashion, social concern, artistic style or political event found its expression through postcards. This collection of production and distribution archives captures that global view.
City Portraits
Picture postcards were an integral component of maintaining relationships in the early 20th century, and The Newberry Library holds many that capture their beauty and excitement of travel. Postcards from our collection feature exotic locales like Paris, Rio de Janeiro and Nice as well as architectural innovations like skyscrapers in Chicago or Coney Island/Luna Park rides in New York; cultural renaissance projects like cancan dancers at Folies Bergere in Paris or African American newlyweds posing for studio portraits in South India among other subjects – just a glimpse!
The postcards displayed at this exhibition provide insight into people’s attitudes toward their world around 1900 when postcard mania became widespread worldwide. Not just local attractions were popular subjects of postcards; earthquakes and fires often appeared too. Meanwhile more overtly political subjects like suffrage or temperance issues also garnered significant public interest.
postcards provided a rich archive of social information. Their backside messages revealed this fact; some greetings or notes of affection such as “Bonjour!” or “Regards to your parents,” while in others the image and caption became interwoven into its wider meanings, aesthetics, networks, and uses–for instance when marked with scribbling (fig 29).
City Scenes
Postcards typically conjure images of souvenirs sent as holiday greetings between 1900 and the early 20th century; however, postcards were actually an innovative form of global communication used to disseminate photographic images while connecting owners to local and global networks.
Postcards were an innovative form of communication that allowed travelers to share images from cities worldwide, representing cultural and historical themes like New York skylines that symbolize ambition and excitement; photomontage cards that showed gender role changes over time; technological innovations and fashion trends as well as natural disasters that struck around the world.
As well as connecting people, postcards also provided an artistic form. Artists such as Ellsworth Kelly found postcards a particularly appealing form for creative expression due to its combination of sketch, message, semi-intimacy and public audience with clear formal constraints yet playful ambiguities.
Archival postcards offer a unique window into how different cultures communicate across continents through this ubiquitous medium. Used to socialize, promote a business or engage in restorative justice circles, postcards provide a tangible record of visual histories from our planet and this exhibition explores them based on materiality and discursive processes that stitched them into cultures of circulation.
City Streets
Students interested in exploring urban life will find postcards a useful means of documenting its complexities, serving as an expansive social archive that documents how cities change over time due to wars, revolutions and reconstruction. Furthermore, postcards connect individuals worldwide while providing vicarious experiences of disasters like massive earthquakes.
Postcards offer a unique window into urban history, from architectural wonders and cultural evolution to the ever-evolving streetscapes of contemporary metropolises. Postcards also serve as powerful teaching tools that facilitate various learning outcomes: from assessing visual imagination versus fieldwork practices to understanding how archives structure research in an urban environment.
Postcards offer an invaluable means of critically and reflexively engaging with the social ethos of any era, such as this Curt Teich postcard featuring Black business owners on Route 66. William Gallois suggests that postcards “convey the values, beliefs, and purposes” of their time and place while exploring how perceptions alter over time and space.
A postcard is an innovative medium that combines photographic images and written text onto one material object for transmission over distance. This unique format opened up new avenues of communication, simplified divisions between producers and consumers, and established local and global networks – not only among those who created postcards but also those who received them.
City People
Many people consider postcards inexpensive souvenirs bought and sent as keepsakes to family, friends and intimate acquaintances to commemorate a trip abroad. Yet postcards hold more to offer: they show global urban histories rich with ideas, images and emotions project from those who created and used them.
Postcards became widely popular around 1900 as inexpensive means of communicating across all social classes worldwide. Postcards not only depicted local sightseeing trips but also illustrated global events within society such as cultural clashes, women’s issues and newly emerging money sources; furthermore they provided viewers with an intimate experience of events such as disasters that took place faraway.
Postcards were an exemplary symbol of photography’s widespread popularization; they also allowed artists to experiment with image making using its specific formal restrictions and capabilities. Ellsworth Kelly used postcard-sized compositions by Ellsworth Kelly as an outlet for playful explorations of formal structures involving inaccurate scales, tactile elements and purposefully humorous ambiguities that play on tourist views’ unique characteristics.
Lauder Archive postcards present an exquisite window into global cities from various visitors’ perspectives, through various themes and narratives that unfold on these artifacts. Ranging from ancient trading cities in deep Africa such as Timbuktu to bustling metropolises like Paris – this exhibition takes us on an intriguing journey into their captivating beauty and historical charm as captured on postcards.