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Previous books on the subject have been content to dwell on the nostalgia value of the images. This book takes a broader and deeper view. The 122 postcards it reproduces cover the vast range of subjects encompassed by the medium—sometimes lyrical and sometimes bracingly harsh—while Luc Sante’s pathbreaking introductory essay places them in their full historical and artistic context.
Sante argues that the cards were a medium of expression very much like the folk music being made in the same places at the same time—open to the complete and unvarnished experience of life, and enacting tradition even as they embody modernity. Besides that, he demonstrates that they represent a crucial stage in the evolution of photography, as the essential link between the plain style of the Civil War photographers and the vision of the great midcentury documentarians, Walker Evans above all.
Combining his gifts as a chronicler of early twentieth-century America, a historian of photography, and a clear-eyed and eloquent critic, Sante shows how the postcards’ “vast, teeming, borderless body of work” add up to a “self-portrait of the American nation.”
Posted September 19, 2010
Luc Sante in FOLK PHOTOGRAPHY: The American Real-Photo Postcard 1905-1930 brings to our attention, or rather reminds us - for how many of us have cloistered these old postcards handed down to us from our ancestors only to leave them tucked away in 'boxes to be discarded/kept' - of a pastime from the early part of the last century when photos of the family or of interesting moments recorded during vacations or simply from daily lives were taken to a shop where they could be made into postcards to mail for very little money to lucky recipients. This craze was world wide, but Sante has focused on American made postcards, and because of that he dredges up on the pages of this very well designed book some 100 photographs on postcards that survey the spectrum of topics that amateurs felt made interesting (and at times newsworthy) messages to family members dispersed across the country. The variation in imagery is tremendous: a simple portrait of a plumber holding a toilet and tools, strange locations for animals as in pigs on a sidewalk, obviously staged scenes with cutout props as in 'Paper Moon', religious acts, fires and their management by the local firemen, still lifes of death (photographic reliquaries) such as images of the deceased laid to rest in coffins, etc. The emotions these images touch are the spectrum of human interest, from humor to devastation. But it seems that Luc Sante is less interested in the recalling of these times than he is in substantiating these postcards as an important hiatus in the history of photographic art that began with the invention of the camera, then passed to the accessibility of this recorder of human events to the common people, to becoming a means of studying the development of America's progress into and within the industrial age. The book remains entertaining to those who are enchanted with memorabilia, but it also becomes a strong document for studying American history as told by those who lived it. This is an inspiring book, but it also is an important resource for looking back and seeing how we all developed as a people. Highly Recommended. Grady HarpWas this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.