Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard 1905-1930

(lasvegasweekly) ... Luc Sante’s new book, Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard 1905-1930 (Verse Chorus Press, $25), ... is a corner-of-the-mouth critique of all that’s phoney in contemporary art. That the “aesthetic arbiters of the time” (code word: Stieglitz) dismissed the real-photo postcard as inept amateurism, beneath notice, only reaffirms Sante’s belief in the importance of the genre, which he positions as the missing link between the “foursquare plain style” of the Civil War photographers and the rawboned aesthetic of Walker Evans. Locating the real-photo postcard in the “tradition of non-academic art in America, from the itinerant portrait painters of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the graffiti muralists of more recent times,” Sante celebrates folk photography’s “distinctly American” aesthetic, with its “emphasis on inclusion and directness,” an aesthetic whose attractions sometimes amount to little more than “a kind of absence—an apparent refusal or inability to do anything more than state facts, which we in turn perceive as beautiful because they are so distant or so bare.” There are echoes, here, of Whitman’s bear-hug embrace of the common man at his best, and of Chandler’s eye for the poetry of the mundane. In the world before the deluge of images that now inundates our mental lives, the real-postcard photographers preserved “electrifyingly real glimpses of scenes that are halfway familiar and halfway impossibly remote, all the more vivid because they weren’t meant for us." And yet they were. Continued

Postcard by: My Grandmother c1914.