Real Photo Postcards Pictures from a Changing Nation |

Boston Art Exhibition
Museum of Fine Arts
465 Huntington Avenue
Boston Massachusetts 02115

03/27/22-07/10/22

In 1903 at the height of the worldwide craze for postcards the Eastman Kodak Company unveiled a new product: the postcard camera. The device exposed a postcard-sized negative that could print directly onto a blank card capturing scenes in extraordinary detail. Portable and easy to use the camera heralded a new way of making postcards. Suddenly almost anyone could make photo postcards as a hobby or as a business. Other companies quickly followed in Kodak’s wake and soon photographic postcards joined the billions upon billions of printed cards in circulation before World War II.

Real photo postcards as such photographic cards are called today captured aspects of the world that their commercially published cousins never could. Big postcard publishers tended to play it safe issuing sets that showed celebrated sites from towns across the United States like town halls historic mills and post offices. But the photographers who walked the streets or set up temporary studios worked fast and cheap. They could take a risk on a scene that might appeal to only a few or capture a moment that would otherwise have been lost to posterity. As the Victorian formality of earlier photography fell away shop interiors construction sites train wrecks and people acting silly all began to appear on real photo postcards capturing everyday life on film like never before.