Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards

This beautiful book’s cover features a tinted antique postcard showing a richly garbed merchant from Senegal, an image that evokes the world of a century ago, a much more culturally diverse place than today’s franchise-saturated globe. Already, one’s interest in these small treasures of popular art has been piqued, but the book’s essays show how such interest betrays a complicity with the racism, imperialism, and pornography in international postcards of a century ago, as discernible to the politically correct modern eye. In their introduction Christraud M. Geary and Virginia-Lee Webb acknowledge the contradictory responses these postcard images encite. Native postcard subjects may be seen as victims of colonialist exploitation at the same time that one feels “a strange sense of nostalgia. . . . The exotic aura of these foreign peoples has not diminished[,] . . . and if not critically exposed as what they are, the images may indeed reinvoke their original context. In this vein, should such postcards be reprinted at all? This question poses a dilemma that should certainly be kept in mind when looking at the images in this book” (10).

For example, in “Souvenirs of Imperialism: World’s Fair Postcards,” Robert Rydell assumes (without citing any evidence) that the Western response to such imagery was public compliance with “the essential rightness of imperialism” and that those “on display” felt “angry, fearful, defiant, or embarrassed” (58). The page facing this text shows a postcard of a handsome watercolor painting of a native of Nyasaland, and the juxtaposition of Rydell’s thought and the beautifully displayed image does, in fact, induce the attraction-repulsion syndrome the editors referred to in their introduction. I felt embarrassed to admire this expression of postcard art and superb book design, and queasy at the prospect of seeing more of the book’s images while having to read more emotional invective basing whole constellations of oppressed cultural attitudes on the fleeting facial expressions of postcard subjects.

Fortunately, the book’s other essays present more sensible, fact-based perspectives. Picture postcard use began about a century ago, with the conjunction of mass-produced printing, photography, and international travel, according to Howard Woody’s well-documented chapter, “International Postcards.” Cards ranged from beautiful color lithographs of famous or exotic subjects to modest local advertisements. In 1909 in the United States and Great Britain, 1.5 billion postcards were sent, and many others were purchased for immediate curation.

In the United States, Native Americans were popular subjects. In “Symbols, Souvenirs, and Sentiments: Postcard Imagery of Plains Indians, 1898–1918,” Patricia Albers points out that postcard images from Plains Indians tribes were so pervasive that cultural characteristics such as the feathered war bonnet and use of the horse and tipi were adopted by tribes across the country in order to identify themselves as Indians to their fellow Americans.

Photography was the means by which the world came to know itself, and when Commodore Matthew Perry “opened” Japan in the 1850s, a member of his crew began making daguerreotypes of Japanese subjects. In “Japonisme and American Postcard Visions of Japan: Beauties and Workers, Cherry Blossoms and Silkworms,” Ellen Handy notes that at a time when Japanese artistic conventions were influencing Vincent Van Gogh and James Whistler, Japanese photographic conventions for postcards strictly followed European prototypes as to composition. Subject matter varied from maidens in kimonos to commercial and farming scenes.