THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE

Postcard views and their written messages

 “I don't film messages. I let the post office take care of those.”

Bernardo Bertolucci

Usually the correspondence on the backs of postcards is perfunctory and not worth a second glance. Someone has arrived somewhere and the weather is fine, or not. (What is this peculiarly English compulsion to start a postcard by describing the weather?) The very public face of the postcard discouraged people from revealing too much and serious correspondence required the traditional sealed letter. Occasionally however a card turns up with a written message that enhances, contradicts or otherwise changes the way we look at the image. This one, to a Mr. T. P. Carson of Polk St in Minneapolis, was posted from Hague, North Dakota on the 14^th of July, 1911 and reads:

Dear Brother;

I am sending you just a glimpse of myself, my old man and my buckskin pony. You must excuse me for not writing but I have been so busy. Will write you a long letter soon. Hope you are as well as we both are. Love to you from us both.

Your sis, Mrs J Berg.

We can hear a rural Midwestern accent in her phrasing, and that odd mix of familiarity – ‘Sis’ – and formality - ‘Mrs J Berg – is also found in the image. The photographer was most likely a friend and the Bergs look like they are on their way to church; all dressed up with the wide and empty plains of North Dakota behind them. Image and text tell us a lot about the relentlessly long and dull struggle the prairie farmers endured at the turn of last century.

Around the same time and across the Atlantic an unidentified woman wrote from West Hill House in Hastings to ‘A’. West Hill House is a listed building, which in the 1930s was occupied by the popular author Catherine Cookson. With the resources of the Hastings library at hand it wouldn’t be that hard to track down the author of our card, which reads:

Thanks very much for the P.C of last night it came as a pleasant surprise. I am sorry Eva could not see you last night I have not heard from her so I do not know if she has gone to her new place or not. I had a postcard from Frank (Eva’s brother) this morning he wanted to know if I got home safe last Wednesday night & said he was sorry he did not see me again (Don’t laugh) I am sorry it is ended with your girl through us but still if your not worrying it doesn’t much matter does it I’m afraid there’s not much love lost between you.

The absence of punctuation, the sloppy grammar and the catty tone point to someone in her late teens or early twenties. Note her acknowledgement, even the faint boast, of the part she played in breaking up the relationship between A and his girl. A few years later she could be cast as one of the flippantly cruel young socialites in Evelyn Waugh’s novels. Notice that ‘A’ sends her a P.C but Frank sends her a postcard. I suppose casual abbreviation was one way she distinguished friends from hopeless dolts. Note too the otherwise straight topographical view she has chosen. West Hill House is probably visible in this image, which is why she selected it, but she is unaware that her choice of image reveals how prosaic and suburban her outlook really is. 

 To Germany on September the 13th 1909, where Ella writes to Miss Alice Duvet in Dorchester and in three brief sentences tells us a lot we may one day find useful.

Wouldn’t this stop a clock? In 7 days we start sail for America and if possible will land in 12 days. Most likely it will be 14.

The expression, to have a face that would stop a clock, was current at the time and referred to someone who was particularly ugly. Ella sounds too polite to brand anyone else that bad looking so we can assume she is the woman in the photo. Is that her father with the camera? The person who took this was most likely another family member or a local photographer working the tourist market. The most interesting detail is in regards to the time needed to cross the Atlantic. There’s quite a discrepancy, a whole 48 hours between 12 and 14 days, even for the mechanized and technological 1900s. If a face could stop a clock, heavy fog and storms could halt an ocean liner. 

As previous posts have claimed, Fred Judge was the quintessential British photographer, meaning not just that he photographed the life and the land in detail but it is also hard to imagine him working anywhere else. A couple of sentences in a Hastings newspaper from the 1910s suggest he may have taken a brief trip across the Channel to Calais. That, for Fred, was about as exotic as the world got. The number of the card indicates the photo was taken circa 1910 and the scene is somewhere along the south coast of England, most likely between Brighton and Hastings. So far there is nothing remarkable to say. But read on …

Dear Femihan

I received your letter of April 9^th and enclosed a page on May 3^rd, yesterday May 27^th. I am thrilled by this news! “CHEERS”! But dear, do come quickly, before I go … It will be tragic if you arrived when I’m gone!! … I leave Cairo for Dhour el Choueir, Lebanon; (that’s my address) at the beginning of July. Won’t you be here before? I hope & pray. I rang up the Diara (?) today, your uncle could not give me any news as he knew none! Hoping to see you with all the longing of “long absence” Yours, with love, Leila.   

Leila Mestrick has posted the card from Cairo, Egypt to Femihan, who lives in the Maltepe district of Ankara, Turkey. The punctuation and underlining for emphasis are all Leila’s. But how does a very English postcard get mailed from Cairo? Leila has also dated the card May 28^th ’45, which helps explain things: this was during the weeks of progressive surrender by the German forces and Britain would have been in control of Cairo. Leila’s surname is also English, so presumably she married an Englishman. Notice how her English is impeccable though she emphasizes ‘cheers’, a very British idiom, indicating that English is her second language. Femihan speaks it too, demonstrating what we can already read; both women are from educated, prosperous families. Interesting that although we know the photograph was taken on the English coast there isn’t a single detail within it to indicate that. It could have been taken anywhere. Leila’s choice of card was deliberate. She didn’t want one showing a distinctly British scene, of castles or sheep in the fields. Is it too much to see the image of waves crashing on rocks as an allusion to powerful emotions that Femihan would get even if the English hubby didn't? And was there a newsagent in Cairo selling English papers, stationery and postcards or did Leila bring a supply of postcards over from England? Both possibilities tell us something about the British colony in Cairo during the war.

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POSTMAN RINGS TWICE

MATERIAL GIRL

 Photographs as material culture

 “Touch has a memory.” 

John Keats

Photographs as material objects, as stuff, where the visual qualities of the image are secondary to the tactile. The idea scarcely exists today but at the turn of last century and the introduction of the postcard all things seemed possible. Around that time the Japanese Novelty Company in Rhode Island applied for a patent for postcards on balsa. The usual cursory search shows the company had bases across the U.S, from Rhode Island to Iowa and Texas, sending teams of salesmen out to lure customers in with cheap amusements, including balsa postcards that people could insert their own photos in. They are rare these days, not because so few were produced but because the wood was fragile. Also, it has to be said, if the card above is any guide, the company wasn’t at the high end of the art market. It probably gave most of its products a year’s life span at best, but that was ok. If it had loyal customers they’d be back for more. A lobster was slang at the time for a shiftless and unreliable type.

We know more about Isaiah Taber, a photographer who began in the era of the daguerreotype, made a name for himself in San Francisco during the gold rush and went on to open studios in London and England. The 1906 earthquake destroyed his studio and much of his work and he died six years later. Today his name means something to photo-historians of the American west but few others, which is too bad because he was not only prolific, he had one of the sharpest minds when it came to business.

There is some confusion about the Taber bas-relief process. It is on record that Isaiah’s brother Freeman applied for the patent for the process but being the photographer, Isaiah took a lot of the images that would be turned into bas-reliefs, inevitably leading some to assume he was involved in coming up with the idea. It isn’t just historians. Advertisements in the Sydney Morning Herald during 1899 credit Isaiah with the process. According to one ad from June 5 that year, “the result has been pronounced by judges and connoisseurs of the art to be the perfection of photography … and it is morally certain that this new style … will win the custom of every person of artistic tastes”. Further on, the suppliers (Eden Photo Studio) threaten legal action against several companies infringing on their copyright. This is a version of the line, ‘beware of imitations’, suggesting theirs was the only company in town capable of producing proper results.

So what was all the fuss about? As the name suggests, bas-reliefs had a tactile, three dimensional quality produced by placing the image over a stamped impression. It is more difficult than it sounds. The image was being stretched over the impression, and as these examples indicate, each portrait had to be embossed individually. It was one more attempt to enhance the already lifelike qualities of photographs. Though actresses and royalty were popular subjects, ultimately the process would quietly disappear. Like the balsa wood postcard it turned out to be a novelty with brief appeal.

  

The last set of postcards were produced during the dying days of the Art Nouveau movement, when that had ceased to be an exclusive mark of wealth and elegance and filtered down to the hoi polloi. Alongside cheap, mass-produced Charles Rennie MacKintosh look-alike lamps and kitchenware, the middle classes could buy postcards that distinguished them as lovers of beauty without the financial commitment that usually involved.  

The cards were mostly published in Germany and France. Producing them would not have been difficult as appearances might suggest. Once the card stock was selected and cut to size, the design was stamped in and coloured then the portrait cut out and pasted in. The most difficult part would have been the colouring of the embossed surface. 

Though the photographers aren’t identified, the portraits are vaguely familiar. They are of theatre and opera stars and if not from the Reutlinger or Walery studios, from one of their rivals. Ordinarily however studios of their reputation would have put their signatures on the front. That they didn’t suggests that other companies had some arrangement to use them or else, in an age when copyright was still nebulous, simply cut out the parts from photographs that they needed and added them in.

The woman in this card is the same as in the card above, taken at the same photo shoot. This one however was posted in Chile. Presumably the originals were distributed from Paris or Berlin to points around the globe at which point local companies could add whatever details they wanted. Incidentally, the back of this postcard bears a stamp and postmark and a woman’s name (Alicia) but no address for her. Was the image too upfront for the Chilean post office? Or was it customary to have the postcard stamped then placed in an envelope to protect privacy? 

One thing about Art Nouveau that is easy to overlook these days: at the time it was modern – by definition - but it was also essentially nostalgic. Everything about it evoked an earlier age, often as not one lost in the mist of ancient history. Coming of age at the dawn of the automobile, the telephone and powered flight, the art nouveauists had to embrace technology even though it was in conflict with their aesthetic sense of unhurried elegance. The ideal woman wrote long letters, she didn’t sit on the phone, and she preferred the hot air balloon to the aeroplane. A plane after all was good for flying from point A to point B – which at that time wasn’t very far – but a balloon ascended to the heavens. 

If the definition of a photograph is anything that includes one, then that is what these postcards are, but they exist at the fringes, owing more to jewellery, graphic design and even architecture than they do photography. Even if some of these have a sophistication and imagination that makes them almost beautiful, it is more their curiousness that is eye-catching. The idea wasn’t exactly original; Victorian photo-collages used a similar idea of mixing photographs with drawings and some tintypes came in elaborate sleeves that were meant to be part of the whole image, but whoever first came up with this idea didn’t have to see any precedents. The notion of combining portraits of noted Parisian beauties with the iconography of what was still considered beautiful design was as inevitable as it was logical, as was its essential failure.

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MATERIAL GIRL