In the essay introducing selections from his collection of real-photo postcards, Sante writes of these images as documents of the moment when the US was becoming modern. The medium was not yet the message. Amateur photographers recorded muddy Main Streets, trolley wrecks, electric lights, hunting trophies, first flights, political parades and protests. The images are a kind of naïve folk-art, says Sante, but with the ability to ‘pierce’ the viewer with an uncalculated detail, accidental framing, contingent facial expressions, & enigmatic hand-written messages along an edge.

What I mean to suggest by the word ‘folk’ is something more specific than merely ‘vernacular,’ but also more spectral. I want it to convey something about the invisible-telegraph transmission of ideas, about the special kinds of inventiveness and self-reliance required by artists working in relative isolation from their peers (a factor existing in parallel rather than in opposition to that invisible telegraph), about the particular constraints and liberties experienced by artists who were thought of as mere artisans or perhaps service professionals by their clients, about the uncertainty as to whether decisions made by the photographers were artistic choices rather than accidental or expedient, about the incursion of modern technology into lives far from any main stem, and how that technology recorded and thus seemingly helped perpetuate traditional ways but actually helped undermine them.

Atwater Winter Bock
Opa Opa IPA