Going Postal: Photography and Exchange

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.