Going Postal: Photography and Exchange
Going Postal: Photography and Exchange
Prof Geoffrey Batchen
5pm Fri 17 July 2026
Oakeshott Room, Lincoln College
(Free to attend)
Exchange has always been a—perhaps even the—primary motivation for the taking of personal photographs. This paper will offer a history of one such mode of exchange, the one involving the real-photo postcard, millions of which were sent and received during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The real-photo postcard has its own distinctive attributes as an image form, but it has also had a significant impact on avant-garde photographic practice, thereby engineering a formative exchange between the vernacular and artistic worlds. Most importantly, the postcard is a mode of communication in which the sending of photographs generates a debt that can only be paid in kind. In short, a history of the humble real-photo postcard may well also tell us something pertinent about the political economy at the heart of social media today.
