The stamp of fantasy : the visual inventiveness of photographic postcards : from the collections of postcards of Gérard Lévy, Peter Weiss

"This book is published on the occasion of the exhibition: The stamp of fantasy: the visual inventiveness of photographic postcards at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Jeu de Paume / Hôtel de Sully, Paris, and Museum Folkwang, Essen."--Colophon
We cite from the cover: -
"Recently, there has been a growing tendency to reflect photography by investigating its function as a medium of distribution -as press photos, photography books or photographic objects Over the past few years, numerous publications and exhibitions have not only accounted for greater public attention, but also for significant progress within the History of Photography. The present publication contributes to this field of research. The Stamp of Fantasy focuses on precisely the one medium, which - several years before the illustrated journal or illustrated book - helped to make photography a medium of distribution to the masses, the postcard. Around 1900, photographic postcards became immensely popular. Besides views of towns and landscapes, publishers also brought out -beneath the generic term "fantasy postcard" - more entertaining images, greetings or April Fools cards and illustrated proverbs, or fantastical, humorous, or even erotic, images. In order to create these visual curiosities, the photographers hired by the postcard publishers relied on a panoply of technical effects achieved by means of montage, superimposition, multiple exposure, optic distortion and the large-format negative, all common amongst professionals but not yet known to the general public. The present book examines the postcard industry's extraordinary visual inventiveness during the early decades of the 20th century. -
The visual upsurge caused by the popularity of the postcard also left a lasting impact on contemporary photography, as practiced by both amateurs and professionals at the time, as well as in artistic circles. Paul Eluard, André Breton and Salvador Dalî, amongst other artists of the 1920s and 1930s, collected fantasy postcards. Hannah Hoch, Herbert Bayer and Man Ray, to name but a few, used them as material or models for their own work. Ultimately, as Paul Eluard wrote back then, and as The Stamp of Fantasy now seeks to confirm, these postcards were perhaps not "art" in themselves, but rather art's "small change". As a currency in their own right, postcards sometimes put "the idea of gold" within reach."