Lynda Klich

Postcards of a nation embracing a new democratic technology The ubiquity of photography and social media today makes it hard to imagine a time when it was not possible for ordinary people to take their own pictures and send them with short messages over long distances. But it was revolutionary when the Eastman Kodak Company, in 1903, unveiled a new postcard camera that produced a postcard-size negative that could print directly onto a blank card. Suddenly almost anyone, amateurs and entrepreneurial photographers alike, could take a picture—of neighbors at home and at work, local celebrations, newsworthy disasters, sightseeing trips—and turn it into a postcard. This book captures this moment in the history of communications—from around 1900 to 1930—through a generous selection of what came to be known as “real photo postcards” from the extensive Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive. As the formality of earlier photography falls away, these postcards remind us that the past was occupied by people with distinct and individual stories, dramatic, humorous, puzzling and surprising.

The Noisemakers examines Estridentismo, one of Mexico’s first modern art and literary movements. Founded by poet Manuel Maples Arce, Estridentismo spurred dynamic collaborations and debates among artists, writers, and intellectuals during the decade following the Mexican Revolution. Lynda Klich explores the paradoxical aims of the movement’s writers and artists, who deployed manifestos, journals, and cubo-futurist forms to insert themselves into international vanguard networks as they simultaneously participated in the nationalist reconstruction of the 1920s. In crafting a cosmopolitan Mexican identity, Estridentista artists both circulated images of modern technologies and urban life and updated such traditional subjects as masks and Mexican types. Klich reads the movement’s radical cultural production as a call for active sociopolitical engagement and characterizes Estridentismo as an ambitious program for national cultural and social modernity in the early twentieth century. Exploring the tensions that emerged from these divergent cosmopolitan and local proposals, The Noisemakers brings Mexico into the dialogue of global modernisms.

The first comprehensive exploration of postcards used as propaganda on all sides of the major military and political conflicts of the twentieth century, including World Wars I and II A Russian Socialist worker raises the red flag. Adoring crowds greet Hitler and Mussolini. Uncle Sam orders Americans to enlist. These images and many more circulated by the millions on postcards intended to change minds and inspire actions around the time of the two World Wars. Whether produced by government propaganda bureaus, opportunistic publishers, aid organizations, or resistance movements, postcards conveyed their messages with striking graphics, pithy slogans, and biting caricatures – and in a uniquely personal format. The more than 350 cards reproduced in full colour in this book advocate for political causes and celebrate war efforts on all sides of the major conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century. The accompanying text shows how a ubiquitous form of communication served increasingly sophisticated campaigns in an age of propaganda, and highlights the postcards collected here as both priceless historical documents and masterworks of graphic design.