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The Postcard: A Visual and Textual Form of Communication and it began to be courted by generations of collectors. The “flirtation” continues 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 individuality 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 condition 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 depends 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 classic 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 different 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 visualization 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
