Customer Reviews

Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards

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This is a beautifully produced collection of essays and images that provides an overview of the role of postcards in the transformation of indigenous cultures under European-American rule. While conveying the romantic fascination of exotic places for the Western consumer, the book also addresses the underlying issues of arrogance and exploitation by the rulers towards their indigenous subjects. This book is an excellent introduction and overview of an emerging area of historical and anthropological study.

For a decade I have been recommending this as the best book available for scholars on postcards of ethnicity. I am an anthropologist and a collector, and I have both enjoyed it and used it in teaching and writing. I still recommend it highly, but am adding this late review not only to recommend this book but also a couple of others for readers who like this one.

In 2006 Robert Bogdan and Todd Weseloh published Real Photo Postcard Guide: The People's Photography, and I consider that the best general book available on RPPCs (full disclosure: I know them both slightly, from the show circuit). In 2010 Bogdan published another one, this time with Arnold Arluke, Beauty and the Beast: Human-Animal Relations as Revealed in Real Photo Postcards, 1905-1935. This new one is, if anything, even better than its predecessor.

Delivering Views remains the go-to work on ethnic/cultural images in travel postcards, and I highly recommend it for collectors interested in learning more about cultural production - and especially for scholars who want to draw on images in their research. For those who want to explore further the world of popular photography, and collectors interested either more generally in RPPCs or specifically in images of people and animals, try also the Bogdan books!