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Scenes of Reading on the Early Portrait Postcard

When picture postcards began circulating with a frenzy across the United States and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, a certain motif proved popular: photographs of people posed with books. Melina Moe and Victoria Nebolsin explore this paradoxical sign of interiority and find a class of image that traverses the poles of absorption and theatricality.

Sporadic cases of it were observed in the United States and the year 1900 saw the malady rapidly spread from one center of infection to another.” Symptoms might include mailing cards to oneself or demanding that one’s pedestrian hometown have custom postcard sets, as in “Tenafly, N. J., for instance, [where] the inmates of that New Jersey suburb awake to the fact . In 1910, The American Magazine, founded by a group of leading muckrakers which included the pioneering journalist Ida Tarbell, ran a polemic “Upon the Threatened Extinction of the Art of Letter Writing”, in which postcards were sarcastically deemed “a heaven-sent relief . The intensity of their concentration is demonstrated through moments of “self-forgetting”: a philosopher so sunk in thought as to be oblivious of the dinginess of his study, or a woman so caught up in listening to the Bible read aloud that she can ignore the chaos of children and dogs erupting around her.

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