By Suzanne Révy
In the vast scope of human history, millions of human beings— with a few notable exceptions—were born, lived, worked and died leaving no visual trace of their existence. That changed in the late 19th century after photography’s invention. Enter George Eastman and the Kodak company, who, in 1903, came up with a camera and printing system called the Real Photo Postcard. These gelatin silver contact prints mounted to cardboard became wildly popular throughout the U.S., and now function as an extraordinary record of early 20th century American life. A selection from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection are on view in “Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston through July 25th, 2022.
Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation on view in the Herb Ritts and Clementine Brown Galleries at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. (Installation photograph by Suzanne Révy)
“Teacher in the Classroom” from the exhibition Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation, courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
“Seen in Chinatown, San Jose, CA” from the exhibition from the exhibition Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation, courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
The installation is immersive and transporting. Three hundred works from the collection are mounted in floating walls throughout the gallery, allowing visitors to wander past exquisitely detailed and intimate images that are organized thematically. There are political rallies and parades, school groups and sport teams, workers, farmers and the occasional train wreck. In the center, a large grid of portraits reveal the dignity of humanity with remarkable cultural diversity and an archaic patina of silver that emerges when viewing from certain angles. These well crafted portraits anticipate the work of August Sander, who began his opus People of the Twentieth Century in 1911 in Europe. Though local or small town photography studios did not intend to create a typology as Sander did, the presentation here speaks to the early 20th century zeitgeist and fascination with portraiture and the impulse to build archives.
Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation on view in the Herb Ritts and Clementine Brown Galleries at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. (Installation photograph by Suzanne Révy)
“Votes for Women” from the exhibition Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation on view in the Herb Ritts and Clementine Brown Galleries at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. (Installation photograph by Suzanne Révy)
There is a delicacy to these pictures, not only as traces of lived experiences, but as relics of a time of economic and social shifts, the industrialization of the workplace, isolationism, nationalism and the distant threat of war. As documents, the images reflect an honesty about American life that their commercially produced counterparts miss. Glimpses of quotidian matters framed within the continuous tone of the prints and the occasional written notations on the back or etched in the negative raise questions around the events pictured or the people participating. They are by turns whimsical, tragic and even eerie, allowing us to see how history may be repeating itself more than a century later.
“Woman with Flowers” from the exhibition “Votes for Women” from the exhibition Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation, courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. (Installation photograph by Suzanne Révy)
“Photographer in the Field” from the exhibition Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation on view in the Herb Ritts and Clementine Brown Galleries at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
In a mellifluous flight of fancy, the museum has installed a set with a replica cut-out moon so visitors can create their own postcard view amidst similar studio portraits. Nearby, a vitrine contains an actual Kodak postcard camera and its accessories. In addition, a handsome catalog by Linda Kilch and Benjamin Weiss is available featuring many of the postcard images and essays by Eric Moskowitz, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Annie Rudd, Christopher B. Steiner and Anna Tome.
Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation on view in the Herb Ritts and Clementine Brown Galleries at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. (Installation photograph by Suzanne Révy)
My son poses on the paper moon set of Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation on view in the Herb Ritts and Clementine Brown Galleries at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. (Personal postcard photograph by Suzanne Révy)
Display case with a postcard camera and accessories, a large image of an early 20th c. photography studio in the Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation on view in the Herb Ritts and Clementine Brown Galleries at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. (Installation photograph by Suzanne Révy)
From the exhibition Dawoud Bey: Night Coming Tenderly, Black by Dawoud Bey, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
While at the MFA, be sure to see the ongoing installation of ten prints in Dawoud Bey: Night Coming Tenderly Black. Bey’s nighttime landscapes imagine the experience of enslaved Blacks escaping to freedom through the Underground Railroad in northern Ohio. Taking inspiration from the poet Langston Hughes and the 2oth century photographer Roy DeCarava, Bey’s haunting pictures ask viewers to slow down, to adjust their eyes, and to find empathy for the fraught emotional space that enslaved people navigated in their search for freedom and security.
Dawoud Bey: Night Coming Tenderly, Black, an ongoing exhibition in the Frances Vrachos Gallery/Mary Stamas Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. (Installation photograph by Suzanne Révy)
For more information: https://www.mfa.org
To purchase the Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation catalog: https://mfashop.com/real-photo-postcards-pictures-from-a-changing-nation/
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