Postcards at the Met

Today I visited the exhibit "Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard" at the Met Museum. I love postcards in general, and have a box full of them that people have sent me over the years (about half are from Alexandra, who I've known since kindergarten). The exhibit was a display of about 9,000 postcards from American photographer Walker Evans' personal collection. The picture postcard, which the exhibit asserts is an expression of American realism, significantly influenced Evans' photography. It was fascinating to see postcards from the first few decades of the 20th century from all over America, some with messages to Evans scrawled on them. Most of them were produced before color printing, so they were colored in by hand, and the results are very vibrant, unrealistic colors that jump out, even after decades.

There were many amazing postcards of turn-of-the-century New York, and it was fun to see familiar landmarks and intersections as they were 100 years ago.

I thought this postcard was hilarious, so my friend Lael and I managed to sneak a picture of it on her phone before leaving the exhibit.

Many of the postcards were of small-town America - you can see how they influenced Evans' photography. Below is one of his photographs that he printed on postcard paper in the mid-1930s.