Seeking Meaning in Context

Recently, I met with Andy Kraushaar, the visual materials curator at the Wisconsin Historical Society, to discuss his postcard collection. When we met, I was hoping that I would discover a collection of postcards with a story behind it, especially, in the archival sense, a provenancial story. As our meeting and discussion progressed, however, the difference of visual materials became clear to me once again. Images have an appeal that defies original order. People collect and exchange them for their own sake. Historically this has resulted in images often being removed from their context in archival collections and organized for subject-based access. It has also resulted in what archivists call artificial collections, an assemblage of chosen items rather than a group organically accumulated as the byproduct of a function.

Yet with people’s affinity for narrative and story, there is always a story. In Andy’s collection of postcards, the story that emerged for me was part of the history of photography. Before the widespread mechanical reproduction of images, hobbyists and professionals produced photos through painstaking and sometimes toxic methods, images are that compelling. In the history of postcards, the real-photo postcard preceded the mass-produced postcard. In other words, people mailed the original prints themselves with messages and stamps affixed to the back. For a time, Kodak produced photo-printing paper with postcard graphical conventions on the back like the separating line down the middle. The high-fidelity of actual photographs came casually and sweetly in the mail.

Andy has collected a number of real photo postcards mainly for their compelling and unusual composition. We looked at a number of them on his Flickr photostream. As I browsed through them, I simply wondered. What did this mean to people? Who are those people? Who made that and who did they send it to? Find a few of my favorites below.

Find more real photo postcards in Andy Kraushar’s photo stream on Flickr by searching for his user name akrausha and the tag rppc for real photo postcards. There are currently 214 in the collection.

Images Courtesy of: Andy Kraushar.

Special thanks to Andy Kraushar for his inspiration, stories, and time!

Entry complied by: Virginia Corvid