Previous books on the subject have been content to dwell on the nostalgia value of the images. This book takes a broader and deeper view. The 122 postcards it reproduces cover the vast range of subjects encompassed by the medium—sometimes lyrical and sometimes bracingly harsh—while Luc Sante’s pathbreaking introductory essay places them in their full historical and artistic context.
Sante argues that the cards were a medium of expression very much like the folk music being made in the same places at the same time—open to the complete and unvarnished experience of life, and enacting tradition even as they embody modernity. Besides that, he demonstrates that they represent a crucial stage in the evolution of photography, as the essential link between the plain style of the Civil War photographers and the vision of the great midcentury documentarians, Walker Evans above all.
Combining his gifts as a chronicler of early twentieth-century America, a historian of photography, and a clear-eyed and eloquent critic, Sante shows how the postcards’ “vast, teeming, borderless body of work” add up to a “self-portrait of the American nation.”
