Constructing Memory: Picture Postcards of New York City

The postcard considered as object and as metaphor has an intriguing place in contemporary arts and letters. Carrie Fisher's Postcards from the Edge (1987) and the Mike Nichols film of the same title (1990) come to mind, as do E. Annie Proulx's novel, Postcards (1992), and Jacques Derrida's La Carte Postale de Socrate à Freud au-delà (1980). That postcards are grist for the literary mill will not be lost even on Joyce scholars; postcards are mentioned at least ten times in Ulysses, and one passage focuses especially on a picture postcard. With the advent of email and instant messaging, the idea of the postcard as the epitome of short-form communication has gained new life; a book exploring the relationships of mothers and daughters recently sprang from a website, PostcardsFromYoMomma.com.

In the visual arts, two recent exhibitions have incorporated postcards in intriguing ways: at New York's Alexandre Gallery, Will Barnet: Recent Abstract Painting included images on postcards received through the mails; and Zoe Leonard's You See I Am Here After All, at Dia Beacon, used some 4,000 old picture postcards of Niagara Falls to explore its cultural significance. German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven's oeuvre similarly used old picture postcards to examine time and memory, and photographer On Kawara's I Got Up project (1968-1979) involved sending picture postcards to recipients around the globe; the forty-seven cards now collected in the Metropolitan Museum of Art depict images of New York City.

Postcards—especially picture postcards—have been part of modern life for more than a century. And no place in America has been shown as frequently as New York City (Figure 1). These humble documents have connected New York's many visitors with their friends and families the way digital photo transmissions might today. More to the point, postcards of New York created a compelling visual language for understanding the great metropolis on the Hudson River—The Empire City, The Great Emporium, Gotham, The Big Apple. For visitors, postcards embodied memory. For recipients who may never have travelled to New York City, they created memory through the imagination.

Will and Lizzie

We may never know anything about the "Will and Lizzie" who sent a postcard from New York City in 1907, but their names on the front of a colorful card epitomize the power of text and image (Figure 2). One can only wonder what Henry James—who grew up in New York City and returned for a nostalgic visit in 1905—might have thought about their truncated message, but the image and the signatures are somehow complete just as they are. From our electronically connected world, this simple card conjures up remote times—like a wall painting or graffito from Pompeii.

As color images, postcards had no rival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were the only ready-made color pictures available to a mass public as discrete objects that were not part of a magazine or newspaper article, where images stood in tension with text. And they were not made for some ulterior purpose such as advertising. Unlike greeting cards, which came into prominence a half-century before, picture postcards did not limit users to the sentiment of a pre-printed text. While the introduction of the ubiquitous Kodak camera in 1888 gave the average person the ability to record any view at the push of a button, the resulting photographs were one-offs, lacked color, and were subject to the operator's technical talents. Acknowledging the postcard's cultural dominance, Eastman Kodak (with its advertising slogan "you press the button, we'll do the rest") even offered to print clients' personal images as postcards on heavy stock with pre-printed zones for address and postage stamp. Picture postcards spoke to everyone.

Whether mailed or not, picture postcards were collected as reminders of distant places and things seen, and as items of intrinsic beauty and fascination, masterpieces-in-miniature. Collecting was and is the mark of a mass society rising to material advantage, and postcard collecting soon became a...