The real-photo postcard (RPPC) was a postcard, printed in the darkroom on postcard-sized stock, often in editions of a hundred or fewer, which could then be sent by mail at the cheap special rate for postcards. Many were shot and produced by amateurs or small-town photographers, and most were of local events, buildings, or people. The principal impulse behind them was a means for the average citizen to share with distant friends or relatives, by mail, matters of importance or interest in his or her life. The RPPC was a largely folk enterprise, whose boom years were from about 1905 to 1920. Initially, the RPPC clearly had meaning for the photographer, the sender, and the recipient, but as the years passed most became just so much cultural ephemera, on a par with newspaper clippings and the programs for local social or cultural events. Now, a century later, RPPCs are becoming increasingly prized as items of historical, or nostalgic, value.
FOLK PHOTOGRAPHY contains about 120 RPPCs from the collection of Luc Sante, who, somewhat surprisingly for a fellow from Wallonia (the predominantly French-speaking southern part of Belgium), has made a career of sorts in what might generally be called Americana, including the fringes of popular American photography. Sante began collecting RPPCs around 1980, and he chose these 120 from his collection of about 2500 cards as representative of the genre. There are RPPCs of natural disasters (principally floods and fires); small-town street-scenes; pageants and parades; river baptisms; automobile-, train-, and even plane-wrecks; and numerous portraits of everyday people. The most memorable one is of a woman, sitting in a chair and staring glumly straight into the camera, with one hand dangling forlornly and the other holding on her lap her dead baby dressed in a christening gown.
Sante introduces the book with a fine 25-page essay. Among the points he makes is that the prevailing aesthetic of the RPPCs was pictures that were "blunt and head-on", in stark contrast to the aesthetic of the leading artistic photographers of the time, in particular Alfred Stieglitz. Yet the straightforward, unadorned approach of the RPPCs is quite similar to the aesthetic of a later generation of professional photographers, most notably Walker Evans, but also Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee, and many others.
The book is handsomely produced, with one photograph printed per page. For those already interested in RPPCs, it probably is a must. Most of those with more general interests in photography or Americana probably will find it sufficiently intriguing to spend an hour or so with it, but then it is likely to slowly gravitate to the bottom of whatever stack, bookshelf, or box where it is stored.
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