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ePilogue Of what use was the picture postcard? What was the sending and receiving—and the collecting and saving—of postcards all about? How important were the images? A perusal of the short notes that one finds handwritten on vintage postcards is instructive. Reports of travel dominated most of those notations:“Dear Friend.Say,did you know I was away from home and having a good time?” “Say, this is a great place, quite different than Terre Haute.”And yes, some senders of postcards were very much interested in what their postcards actually depicted:“Arrived Ok, and I am sightseeing.Will see if this card is showing things right.”Postcards were cheaper to send than letters, and with little space for writing, they offered an excuse not to write, or at least not to write much: “Dear Uncle and Aunt. I got your letter, but have been sick. Will write later. Don’t worry.” A desire to augment a postcard collection was sometimes important:“Dear Unknown Friend.I would like to exchange cards with you.” Whether received in the mail or specifically purchased, picture postcards lent themselves to collecting. Initially displayed in albums to be shown to others or merely stuffed into shoeboxes for safekeeping, the vintage postcards that survive today attest to a once-vigorous culture of visuality, built around strong geographical concerns . Postcards served to legitimize the places 186 ] Epilogue they depicted. By picturing places just so, they asserted significance, capable of making even the most ordinary of things into spectacle, or near-spectacle. In addition, the postcard viewer, as spectator, was invited to transcend the moment : to think about what was, but also to think about what had been and what was yet to be. Pictured, of course, were the material things that made up a place, things that were important in and of themselves for some reason but that also signified well beyond themselves. Postcards offered viewers an opportunity to assign meaning : personal importance, certainly, but also, and of greater significance, shared social or cultural meaning. They offered an opportunity to share useful iconography with others. Fun to look at, convenient to send to others, and easily saved and treasured, postcards proved an excellent surrogate for place experience,a substitute for actually being there. Postcards offered a variety of mechanisms for remembering, for anticipating, or for merely noting aspects of the visual world.That said,however,an additional observation needs to be emphasized here. At least for Chicago and Downstate Illinois, postcard art offered an embrace of the progressive, and, accordingly , a celebration of lifestyles largely urbane . Such, we feel, is the message that underlies vintage Illinois postcard views taken as a whole. Certainly, modernist faith in science, technology, industrialism, and above all urbanism played out in Chicago postcard art. As pictured in postcards, Chicagonotonlyembodiedmodernitybutseemed very much an originator of the modernist project. Postcards emphasized scenes that spoke reassuringly of an emerging urban future, not just for the Chicago metropolis, but for places well down in the state’s urban hierarchy, including the smallest of towns. Even pastoral or natural scenes tended to carry an urban implication: the mechanized farm, the improved highway, nature ’s potential for recreation. Exposed to view was a fully reassuring America. The fragmented and centripetal nature of life in the United States was largely obscured through the depicting of pacifying, primarily urban unities. The city was a system that was good. Postcard viewers were invited to partake of that system,and to persuade themselves that they were not just part of it but in fact contributors to it.No longer was the city an alienating Other. No longer was the city an object that could be viewed only from the outside looking in.Urbanity,as defined in the picture-postcard perfect tense, became a satisfying home base where experiences clustered, to be enjoyed from the perspective of an insider. Of what use is the vintage postcard to us today ? Its quaint charm,of course,is of lasting value. Postcards offer slices of the past caught for an instant by a camera and rendered as a final product through what are now antiquated printing processes . It is difficult to imagine collectors ever losing interest in postcards as visual culture, if only for their value as artifacts.But for scholars and informed general readers, a deeper appreciation of what postcards represent—what they picture and how they picture it—will always provide an intellectual challenge. Vintage postcards appear to be objective representations of...

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