Page 489 [489]
The Postcard: A Visual and Textual Form of Communication
and it began to be courted by generations of collectors. The “flirtation” contin¬
ues even today, the focus of attention falling on staid old “ladies”? with a past.
Town views, monuments of culture and other attractions are often depicted
on colour photographs. They could be individually consumed. A tinge of in¬
dividuality is added using different decorations such as punches, fragrances,
sounds or images that change with orientation in space. These postcards have
two main disadvantages: they are hard to be preserved in their original condi¬
tion and are not printed in large numbers.
More abstract, complex and dependent on the moment of sending is the
symbiosis between modernity, history, and the messages on the back of the
card, in illustrated postcards with portraits of famous people/celebrities of art,
and politics, monarchs, athletes/sportsmen and so forth. It is assumed that
their purpose is to capture messages of events related to the depicted person,
country or time. The confirmation or negation of this assumption largely de¬
pends on the moment of sending, the identity and the social and political
orientation of the addresser (Fig. 6).'°
The textual and visual context of each sent illustrated card puts its clas¬
sic function as a means of communication in the background. With time, it
turns into complex interdisciplinary evidence of everyday life and the cultural
model, related to personal experiences, projected in the time and the great
ambitions of history. The photographs, illustrations, motifs on the postcards,
understood as different types of images, “visualize” the moment, objects and
personality. Over the years, interest in them grows. The grounds for their dif¬
ferent positioning against the present time, and the otherness are different: new
attitudes towards the visualization of the past and today, a striving to visualize
the interdependencies and the processes of globalization, so that the contexts
will be better understood—and “the strange and otherness” to be rediscovered.
The complex needs of the demand, the specificity of the objects, the purposes
of production and the potential consumers determine the forms of visualiza¬
tion in illustrated postcards (Fig. 7).'' They articulate common notions about
different realities and facilitate the interpretation of the texts, if thematically
related to the illustration.
In a broader sense, the social presence of otherness in the motifs/messages
of the postcards is revealed through these aspects:
e what the image on the postcard is, its meaning and why a particular
motif has been chosen;
e who made the postcard, when, and with what purpose;
e how the Others use this motif, how they understand it.
" I compare old postcards with “old ladies” who have had an interesting life.
10 Postcard no. 85, August 3, 1986.
" Postcard no. 14, July 28, 1979.
487