Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards

by Christraud M. Geary (Editor), Virginia-Lee Webb (Editor)

The heyday of postcard production was also an era of rapidly expanding European and American control over the rest of the world. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, images of distant peoples from the Americas, Africa, Oceania, and Asia became ubiquitous souvenirs of imperialism.

The six contributors to this abundantly illustrated volume show how images of Plains Indians, World's Fair cards, and portraits from Africa, the Pacific Islands, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan documented distant cultures but also reinforced Western biases by emphasizing the seemingly vast cultural differences between viewers and subjects. The authors discuss the differences between original photographs and their postcard equivalents, and they explore in detail common practices -- such as artificial settings, costumes and props, colorization, and patronizing captions -- that perpetuated racist, sexist, and romantic stereotypes.

Drawing on anthropological, historical, and art historical analyses, contributors examine examples from both public and private collections, tracing the postcard's overlapping roles as souvenir, collectible, and popular art form. Showcasing 132 images, many of which have never before been published, the book concludes that early postcards both provide historical information about the peoples they depict and reveal Westerners' perceptions of -- and apprehensions about -- cultures that differed from their own.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published April 17, 1998

Reviews

[Frederic · Rating 5 out of 5]

My (2011) review from Amazon: For a decade I have been recommending this as the best book available for scholars on postcards of ethnicity. I am an anthropologist and a collector, and I have both enjoyed it and used it in teaching and writing. I still recommend it highly, but am adding this late review not only to recommend this book but also a couple of others for readers who like this one.

In 2006 Robert Bogdan and Todd Weseloh published Real Photo Postcard Guide: The People's Photography, and I consider that the best general book available on RPPCs (full disclosure: I know them both slightly, from the show circuit). In 2010 Bogdan published another one, this time with Arnold Arluke, Beauty and the Beast: Human-Animal Relations as Revealed in Real Photo Postcards, 1905-1935. This new one is, if anything, even better than its predecessor.

Delivering Views remains the go-to work on ethnic/cultural images in travel postcards, and I highly recommend it for collectors interested in learning more about cultural production - and especially for scholars who want to draw on images in their research. For those who want to explore further the world of popular photography, and collectors interested either more generally in RPPCs or specifically in images of people and animals, try also the Bogdan books!

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a visual delight, but more importantly it tries to comment on the arrogance of the Euro-American gaze towards indigenous people, especially as reproduced through these postcards of the late 19th and early 20th century.