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Going Postal: Photography and Exchange

30 January 2020, 6:30 pm–8:30 pm

Going Postal: Photography and Exchange

Research Seminar

Event Information

Open to

All

Organiser

Richard Taws

Location

Seminar room 3
20 Gordon Square
London
WC1E 6BT

Exchange has always been a—perhaps even the—primary motivation for the taking of personal photographs. This paper will offer a history of the real-photo postcard, millions of which were sent and received during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The real-photo postcard has its own distinctive attributes as an image form, but it has also had a significant impact on avant-garde photographic practice, thereby engineering a formative exchange between the vernacular and artistic worlds. A study of that exchange may well provide a critical insight into those worlds, and especially into their respective political economies.

About the Speaker

Professor Geoffrey Batchen

at Department of History of Art, University of Oxford

More about Professor Geoffrey Batchen