Full Description
Products of modernity, postcards continue to provoke comment today as in the nineteenth century. With their unique status as interdisciplinary image-objects that cross lines of geography, economy, and gender, postcards epitomize the complex history of visual culture. These often sweet, nostalgic, inexpensive mementos of commercial culture have also been carriers, even instigators, of colonialist exoticism and political propaganda. They straddle the by now largely obliterated line between "high" and "low" art, between an earlier modernist art history and more recent work in visual culture. This fully illustrated volume is the first of its kind to bring together the latest interdisciplinary research on postcards as a significant area of scholarly inquiry.
In addition to the editors, the contributors are Rebecca J. DeRoo, Ellen Handy, Elizabeth B. Heuer, Timothy Van Laar, Annelies Moors, Cary Nelson, John O'Brian, Naomi Schor, Kimberly A. Smith, Rachel Snow, Nancy Stieber, and Andrés Mario Zervigón.
Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Jordana Mendelson and David Prochaska
1. Cartes Postales: Representing Paris 1900
Naomi Schor
2. Postcards and the Invention of Old Amsterdam Around 1900
Nancy Stieber
3. Correspondence Here: Real Photo Postcards and the Snapshot Aesthetic
Rachel Snow
4. Postcards to the Front: John Heartfield, George Grosz, and the Birth of Avant-Garde Photomontage
Andres Mario Zervigon
5. Ambivalent Utopia: Franz Marc and Else Lasker-Schüler's Primitivist Postcards
Kimberly A. Smith
6. Colonial Collecting: French Women and Algerian Cartes Postales
Rebecca J. DeRoo
7. Presenting People: The Politics of Picture Postcards of Palestine/Israel
Annelies Moors
8. Exhibiting the Museum
David Prochaska
9. Outward and Visible Signs: Postcards and the Art-Historical Canon
Ellen Handy
10. Les plus belles cartes postales
Paul Éluard
With an introduction by Elizabeth B. Heuer
11. Main Street Looking North from Courthouse Square
Walker Evans
With an introduction by Elizabeth B. Heuer
12. Love Your Panzer Corps: Rediscovering the Wartime Poem Postcard
Cary Nelson
13. Postcard to Moscow
John O'Brian
14. Views of the Ordinary and Other Scenic Disappointments
Timothy Van Laar
List of Contributors
Index
