Potential of postcards

Views of city boulevards or idyllic landscapes, of factories or holiday resorts, of alpine peaks or people in traditional dress: since the turn of the twentieth century, postcards have not only shaped the way people see their surroundings, but also the stereotypical image of the “other”. At the same time, postcards have had a broad impact on people communicating by means of images and launching new forms of social interaction and understanding. In their complex mediality, they are an interesting and worthy topic today for a variety of reasons—also and especially in museums. But how can a mass-produced museum object like the postcard be treated adequately? What curatorial strategies are there for showing the agency of postcards in relation to collective ways of seeing and forms of knowledge? And how can we, at the same time, take into account the specific characteristics of this mass-image medium, its form of circulation by mail, and its combination of image, text, and handwriting? This topic not only presents challenges in terms of exhibiting postcard collections, but also in terms of cataloguing and (digitally) communicating them. We would like to discuss different methodological questions and approaches and explore the potential of an often-underestimated museum object.