In the years around 1900, postcards became incredibly popular as an innovative form of communication; their designs and humorous remarks captured people’s hearts so deeply that collecting postcards was often described as an addiction.

Despite this common cultural perception, academic research on postcards remains relatively scarce.

A Visual Diary of Global Exploration

By the turn of the twentieth century, postcards had become one of the most widely circulated forms of photography, serving as an invaluable means of sharing and networking across distances that would otherwise be impossible. In contrast to carte de visites or cabinet cards which primarily functioned for decorative or formal reasons only, postcards combined images and text for postal delivery through global postal systems; furthermore they allowed individuals to personalize their messages by selecting images or writing custom messages themselves.

Although postcards have long been part of history, academic research often ignores them as mere expressions of popular culture (Ferguson 2005). Recently however, more critical research has focused on their role as an ephemeral medium that reveals both its ambivalence and potentiality of representation.

Postcards can be an excellent way to illustrate ethnographic fieldwork in several ways. They can encourage students conducting fieldwork to look for postcards from their research sites and reflect upon any disconcordance between visual imagination and experiences in the field. Postcards may also help teach about archival processes relevant to ethnographic research.

This collection of postcards pays homage to Nate Smith’s heartwarming and soulful musical project Kinfolk as well as being a reminder of all of their travels, experiences, and the many unique cities with which he has interacted over his journeys.

The Age of Postcards

At around 1900, postcard mania swept the nation. Millions of these tiny treasures were sent across borders and pasted into albums en masse; large historical and cultural themes played out on postcard’s tiny canvas: urban life as seen through Emile Combaz’s series; the changing role of women; sports, celebrity culture, new technologies, World War I.

Postcard publishers sought to produce cards that were both visually appealing, souvenir-marketed, and offered information about the world. Their designs had to be both appealing to the eye and easy for mailing; hence the postcard’s unique look with its divided back. Furthermore, postcard publishers used specialty printing techniques that created illusions of paintings or photographs.

Postcards were an innovative form of media studies’ recognition that the creator of any work never fully determines its meaning and usage. By encouraging communication and the inclusion of personal notes on postcards, media studies sought to show its understanding that meaning and use never depend solely on one individual or group of creators.

This collection includes administrative and production archives from Teich Company as well as printed works – most notably postcards featuring events of note like 1920 Haiyuan (Gansu) earthquake which killed over 200,000 and did not receive much coverage, and 1906 Valparaiso Earthquake which did receive extensive press attention.

The Postcard Age

A postcard is the quintessential travelling object: its movements across time and space bring new meaning through changing ownership and display. Additionally, its mobility makes it an excellent vehicle for exploring global culture’s connections among places, people, practices, archives, exhibitions, flea markets collector fairs as well as online and book collections – where its value may or may not increase depending on contexts into which it finds itself placed – but their migration patterns reveal interesting traces of interaction, exchange and consumption which shed light on how cultures interacted during early twentieth century global cultures interacted globally.

At their height during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, postcards were one of the largest classes of artifacts ever exchanged between humans. Their rich historical content includes detailed captions, colorized images (unlike other media such as black-and-white photographs), postal stamps with names of issuing nations and written messages from senders or printed information from publishers – all contributing to its rich historical record keeping capability.

As a mass production medium, postcards were dependent on a complex network of producers such as photographers and their apprentices, German and British printers, department-store sellers and bookstores – each contributing their skills towards mass production of images of boulevardiers, cancan dancers and European civilisation that could be enjoyed vicariously by anyone with some spare change in their pocket.

The Postcards of the World

The postcard is an extraordinarily powerful “social archive”, capable of breaking down distinctions between producer and consumer; creating global and local networks; connecting dispersed families, friends, industries; reworking photographs across time and space in diverse ways; as well as being an innovative medium that enabled people to combine photographic image with text into one physical object sent long distances – connecting into global circulations of print media circulation networks.

Postcards were so prevalent around 1900 that nearly every fad, fashion, social concern, artistic style or political event found expression through them. This exhibition displays some of their many forms – such as New York skylines that express ambition and excitement or photomontage postcards depicting early twentieth century marriages – through postcards.

A series of black-and-white and hand-tinted postcards demonstrate how images on the front can be combined with text to provide a personalized perspective from someone known. One such postcard, entitled “Groet uit Java” (“From Java”) conveys humor while reflecting a desire to reinforce European master-servant hierarchies and anxieties around domestic insubordination.

This exhibition also displays postcards that document some of the world’s worst disasters, which has long been studied academically. While previous academic research into disaster postcards emphasized visual content, these examples demonstrate how postcards may contain various types of data such as publishers, photographers, illustrators, printing styles, postal codes, dates, messages, documentary images, correspondence advertisements or ephemera that help reveal historical context and motivations behind sending cards in response to catastrophes.