MONUMENTS

The scene is quiet; the Thames embankment nearly empty. In the bottom left-hand corner, a barely visible figure stands by the parapet. Farther along the embankment: the obelisk. Made of granite mined from the ancient quarries by the Nile, the obelisk was first erected in Heliopolis and subsequently moved to Alexandria, where it was later toppled, buried, and, millennia later, excavated before being transported to the city. Here it still sits, on a plinth that holds a time capsule containing photographs, children’s toys, coins, a map of London, hairpins, and newspapers.

NATURAL DISASTERS

In that vast city, I began collecting in a time of dispersal. At an ephemera fair, I came across a vintage postcard depicting the cathedral of Cologne, which I was supposed to visit with someone who was no longer by my side. The image made me cry, but I purchased it anyway. Something about the cheapness and fragility of the diminutive picture spoke to my experience at the time. Perhaps love is the found object par excellence, the most transient and aleatory thing collected.

I became a habitué of ephemera fairs and flea markets. Paul Éluard once wrote to his ex-wife about his habit of hoarding postcards in the aftermath of their divorce: “[I] stay in this apartment arranging my cards. In postcard style, I am crowned with melancholy, decline and neglect.” I too stayed in to arrange my cards. The collecting and organizing structured my days, and the time of heartbreak receded.

Éluard understood this truth about the cartes postales: they not only provide fodder for meditations on the past, but also facilitate an alchemical process by which the flux of existence is transformed into order and calm.

Recto –Trafalgar Square

To Miss Alice Taylor, Watford, Hertfordshire

January 9, 1905

Dear Alice,

Thanks for P/C last week; would have answered it before but I haven’t been well and it “slipt my memory.” Am now much better. Nance says she is quite aware you are alive, but as she wrote last it is your turn to write. Now must say goodbye. Best wishes to all + kind regards, Ted

LOVERS

In the novel Cartes Postales (1973), by Frédéric Vitoux, the narrator discovers a trove of vintage postcards, and proceeds to trace the contours of imaginary lives using both the explicit content and the implicit meaning of the messages.

The postcard, for all its openness, resembles a small, enclosed room, wherein two individuals conduct an intimate conversation. Even in the plainest messages, it is possible to intuit an entire past, shared between sender and recipient, that underpins the correspondence. As Jennifer Croft writes, “It is apparently a paradox that the first essential qualities of postcards, brevity and exposure, are guarantors of closeness (despite separation), emblems of intimacy.”

When Heinrich von Stephan, a German postal service official, proposed the idea of the offenes Postblatt (“open post-sheet”) in 1865, his goal was to expedite communication, to allow for “sufficient simplicity and brevity.” After the first postcards began circulating in 1869 in Austria-Hungary, there were initially concerns about privacy. To evade the voyeur’s eye, senders wrote encrypted messages in code and shorthand, in Latin or Esperanto; some wrote upside down or backwards; others communicated romantic sentiments by positioning the stamp in a particular way. The limitation of space placed constraints upon language yet also liberated it, initiating new ways of writing.

BEACHES

The poet Paul Éluard, like his fellow Surrealists, was an avid deltiologist, a collector of postcards. He traded and shared cards with colleagues; disassembled old postcard albums in order to add to his own collection; rescued the erotic cards he found pasted on the walls of an old house; and took weekend excursions with André Breton to comb flea markets for illustrated ephemera. Once, he supposedly traded a Dalí painting with Georges Sadoul for two hundred postcards.

In his essay “Les plus belles cartes postales” (1933), Éluard celebrates the postcard as a window into the collective unconscious and as fecund soil from which new artworks might germinate. “Postcards,” he writes, “do not constitute a popular art. At most, they are the small change left over from art and poetry. But this small change sometimes suggests the idea of gold.”

But Éluard’s collection speaks less to the desires and fantasies of the masses than to his own. His cartophilia was in part a response to the end of his marriage with Gala, who left him for Dalí. Pining for her, Éluard turned to the fantasy women on postcards, who, in a sense, replaced Gala as his muse. The cards in the category of “Love” reflected his own psychological reality. Éluard writes, “Under two burning hearts, the inscription: United for Life, the sender had crossed out for Life, thus depriving the Other of the idea of death, of that last drop of living blood.” Love, too, was an object of exchange. Perhaps for this reason, Éluard continued to exchange erotic postcards with Gala long after she had left him.

ANIMALS

I collect haphazardly, sometimes because I am drawn to the colours on certain cards: the burgundy and bright yellow sails of ships docked at Le Havre; the grey of a group of donkeys; and the azure sky behind the old Notre Dame de Paris. I also use postcards as notepads: on the verso side of cards showcasing book cover designs, I scribble fragments of essays, stories and novels.

After a year of collecting, I began to see postcards everywhere—in artworks, in literary texts, in films. Now I even see postcards in my sleep. During the day I read about John Stezaker’s Surrealist series of “inserts”—in which a vintage postcard is superimposed on a film still or black-and-white photograph, so that a cascading waterfall appears in the middle of a trial scene and crashing waves interrupt an exchange between two individuals—and at night I dream that my own face and the faces I see around me have been partially masked by a carefully aligned postcard.

Recto – Lake in the Clouds, Rockies

To Hilda Rank, Tooting Common, London

August 9, 1907

Dear Hilda,

You cannot imagine what a wonderful sight it is to have these enormous masses of rock all around you. I have not yet seen the tops of the very high mountains for they are all in the clouds. Will write tomorrow. Dick

FLOWERS

When postcards first became coveted collectors’ items in the late nineteenth century, they democratized the culture of collecting due to their cheapness and ubiquity. Postcards of cityscapes and metropolitan scenes made it possible for anyone to create a personal atlas of the city, and thereby chart the urban transformations taking place around them. Like these nineteenth-century deltiologists, I sometimes wandered down streets and compared the view on a postcard with the scene before me, so that even as the image highlighted what had disappeared, it simultaneously offered a kind of pictorial continuity. Other times, I superimposed a postcard on a completely different site, so that the picture replaced the view before me. In this way, the South Bank Centre, a place that once evoked tremendous sadness, eventually reminded me of a desert garden.

STREETSCAPES

The American photographer Walker Evans amassed over nine thousand postcards in his lifetime, and engaged with them in his own work. Not only did Evans use postcards to determine the themes of his projects, he produced his own photographic postcards of simple, anonymous buildings, and published photo essays—illustrated with cards from his collection—that recorded the history of deltiology and provided a pictorial tour of American cities. Evans also recreated the scenes depicted on certain postcards from the same vantage point, thus foregrounding the changes wrought by time. Writing for Fortune in 1962, Evans described the picture postcard as a “folk document.”

Beginning in the late 1950s, Evans presented postcard slideshows, first for friends in his New York City apartment. The postcard images would be blown up to the size of an entire wall and projected in the dark, as if in a cinema. Later, when invited to lecture at Yale and the Museum of Metropolitan Art about his career in photography, he gave postcard presentations instead. Evans invited his audiences to walk into the pictures, to see their own shadows layered on the streetscape of the past. As he explained, “One can, in effect, re-enter these printed images, and situate oneself upon the pavements in downtown Cleveland, Omaha or Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts.”

PAINTINGS

Prior to 1902, the back side of the postcard was reserved for the address, and the message had to be squeezed into the margins next to the picture. In 1902, the British Post Office launched the “divided back” postcard, allowing the message to be written on one half of the verso, alongside the address, thus reserving the recto side for the photograph or illustration. This change, combined with new printing techniques, led to the dominance of the image. 

Recto – Crue de la Seine, Janvier 1910

To Mademoiselle Fernande Henrienne, Place Cambronne, Paris

March 29, 1912

Il est inutile que vous vous dérangez pour moi, car il m’est complèment impossible de rien pouvoir me préparer pour cette semaine. Mes amitiés à vous.

WATERFALLS

In You see I am here after all (2008), the American artist Zoe Leonard used approximately four thousand vintage postcards of Niagara Falls to create a panoramic grid that ripples across the gallery walls. The mass-produced touristic views are nearly identical, though there are variations in colours and perspective. In Survey (2012), more than six thousand postcards of Niagara Falls are stacked in towering piles. “We use things,” Leonard writes, “to communicate complex ideas, feelings; it is a dense, compact, potent language, the language of the found object.”

Hand-coloured, cropped, and manipulated—sometimes with rainbows painted in to augment the beauty of the scene—these postcards exemplify how the idealized imagery of a singular site is constructed, polished, and disseminated via the tourist shop. Over time, the Niagara Falls have been reshaped by erosion and human intervention. But the postcards do not record such changes. The pictures, for all their minute differences, portray an unvarying cultural construction. It is as if the natural wonder of the falls has remained a frozen thing of beauty, perpetually covetable and collectible.

In much the same way, postcards of cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries romanticized and reframed the urban scene, clearing it of unsightly signs of poverty and modernization. Paris thus became the prosperous centre of leisure and glamour, and Old Amsterdam with its concentric canals came to represent the city, even as the canals of other districts were filled in and canal-side houses torn down to make way for new developments. 

Recto – Clapham Common, London

To Miss Alice Taylor, Watford

July 10, 1905

Dear Alice,

Thanks for P.C. sometime ago. You have not told me what local ones you have got, so I do not know if you have this one or not. Best love, Nance

OBJECTS

She stands on a hill with the others and watches as their city burns. The plumes of smoke have blackened the sky, and orange flames consume the frail forms of the buildings. All around them are scattered the possessions that they were able to rescue in the aftermath of the earthquake.

Her eyesight is blurred by resentment and shock as she looks at the lounging woman, who relaxes on the grass as though she were watching a film. Her own mind is bombarded by the images of all that she could not save, all the lives buried under the rubble of homes that will be rebuilt into utterly unrecognizable spaces.

ISLANDS

At the start of Antonio Tabucchi’s short story “So Long,” the narrator, Taddeo, sorts through his collection of postcards, searching for ones he might be able to send to friends on an upcoming trip. Taddeo playfully mismatches the images with the messages, thereby creating strange juxtapositions. On a postcard showing Robinson Island, he writes “We’re on Timultopec;” on one depicting towers, “This is the Machu Picchu mountain range.”

All the cards are signed “Taddeo and Isabel,” Isabel being the narrator’s partner, with whom he was supposed to have travelled to South America. But she is no longer here. Taddeo packs her photograph in the suitcase with the postcards, so it’ll be as if she were accompanying him on the trip.

Tabucchi’s works are frequently marked by the experience of loss, of the dissonance between what is and what might have been. The cartolina here registers distance: between here and there, origin and destination; between one person’s present and another person’s past; between fantasy and reality. When the postcard is held in the hands, that distance might be temporarily bridged. But in the end, the object reaffirms the pastness of what has already gone.

At the train station, en route to the airport, Taddeo meets a young ice cream seller—also named Taddeo—and gives all his postcards to this boy who dreams of travelling the world when he grows up. The boy, stunned with the unexpected gift, thanks the older man. One day, he might forward the postcards to his own friends; or he might present them to a stranger, who, like Taddeo, has suffered losses for which the collection offers fleeting consolation.

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Recto – St. Paul’s Cathedral

To Miss Harradine, E. Worthing

August 9, 1905

Sorry she has not been so well. I’m afraid it will be very awkward for me to be without E. the first week I am home. I shall not be equal to doing anything without a little help just at first, if I am to avoid relapses, for the journey will be rather an undertaking. Much love, H. B.

RIVERS

Picture postcards abound in the oeuvre of British artist Tacita Dean. Many of her projects involve revising or reframing the postcard, so that the once static image begins to move in entirely new ways.

In The Russian Ending (2001), comprised of twenty photographic postcards portraying natural and anthropogenic disasters, Dean annotated the black-and-white images with film directions—“string music,” “pan down”—thus infusing them with new narrative potential. It is strange to imagine people sending pictorial representations of death and destruction to loved ones. Perhaps the ubiquity of such images dampens their effect and expunges from collective memory the horrors of battlefields, explosions and shipwrecks. Or perhaps they are a reminder that loss is always imminent.

Dean’s c/o Jolyon series (2012–2013)—my favourite of her postcard projects—is likewise preoccupied with catastrophe. It features one hundred pre-war postcards of the German town of Kassel, which was blitzed by Allied bombing raids during WWII. Using photographs taken of the exact same locations, Dean overpainted the pictures with gouache and added details of the modern, postwar city—apartment buildings, cars, street lamps. The result was a layered montage of the real past and the imagined present.

Dean’s elegiac photographs and films are often preoccupied with such processes of disappearance or disintegration. A central irony of her work, as I see it, lies in the fact that these meditations on loss depend, in part, on the chance recovery of lost things. Dean trawls flea markets for vintage ephemera, and the serendipitous encounters lend new meaning to these objects that were once adrift amongst other urban detritus.

Like the Surrealist objet trouvé, the postcard presents a series of absences—the nameless photographer, the unknown writer and recipient; it is constituted by what is unknown. But this opacity is irrelevant, because the found image is really about the person viewing it. As Dean remarks, “Art works best when it responds to the autobiography of the viewer.” Much like a dog following a trail in a zigzagging manner—to use Sebald’s analogy—we follow the memory or thought triggered by the randomly discovered image. The creative act commences when we allow ourselves to be interrupted by the accidental, to be guided by pure contingency.

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RUINS

I am attempting to think through the postcard, with dozens of images strewn across the desk before me. Yet I struggle to complete the essay. Where can I find the space for the contributions of Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, Jacques Derrida, W. G. Sebald, Agnès Varda, Susan Hiller, and David Opdyke? The collection remains incomplete, continually shifting as items are added or removed, and categories redefined. What strikes me about postcards is precisely this: their multiplicity and irreducibility, their tendency to expand outward, beyond the rectangular frame, into something infinitely arresting.

Recto – Ruins Church and Castle Aberdour

To Mrs. Duncan, Stockbridge

[date obscured]

Dear Bell,

I will be down on Sunday afternoon. Will you be going out. Pull the blind down so that I will know before I go. Night dear, Jean

LIGHTHOUSES

The Japanese-born conceptual artist On Kawara dedicated his career to marking time. His projects took on ritualistic or diaristic qualities—artmaking as the quotidian practice of recording time. For his renowned Today series, Kawara created monochromatic canvases using traditional Japanese lacquering techniques, with fourteen to eighteen layers of acrylic paint. On these backgrounds, he used white paint to inscribe the date on which the work was made. If Kawara had not completed a painting by midnight, he would destroy it, as it would no longer be a painting of “today.” Occasionally, he made two paintings in a day; rarely, three paintings. For another project, he sent telegrams with nothing except the message, “I am still alive.”

In the I Got Up series, produced between 1968 and 1979, Kawara mailed thousands of postcards to acquaintances, with the rubber-stamped time of the exact hour and minute he woke up that day. He travelled extensively, and the messages chart his peripatetic wanderings. “I GOT UP AT 6.12 A.M.,” he writes from Hong Kong; “I GOT UP AT 12.11 P.M.,” in Quito, Ecuador.

The postcards form a self-portrait, an archive of the body’s rhythms, its movements and moments of repose. They are also a way of structuring time, of possibly transcending it. As Tom McCarthy writes of the Today series, what the work “iterates is its own time, minus the time. What has actually been kidnapped, held to ransom, by the work is time.” Is this not the function of writing, too? The essay a repository of stray thoughts; the fictional scene a tableau of fleeting emotions; the poem a frieze of remembered acts. We write—on postcards, in notebooks, on screens—to capture time.

When I finish flipping through the exhibition catalogue of Kawara’s works, it is already late afternoon. There is golden sunlight and early spring warmth. I tuck a few blank postcards into a book and follow Kawara out the door. I mentally chart a route along the water. Perhaps somewhere along the way, there will be a café with an empty table, where I might write a postcard with this message: “I got up. I went. I read. I am alive.”

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