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The Postcard: A Visual and Textual Form of Communication different socially, politically, or ideologically from their own everyday life.”° They, local reality and the socialist tourist, differ in their ethnic identity, traditional culture and memories. The local identities are confronted with the other identities under the lid of the unifying striving of the we-identity and the collective. That the messages are testimonials of the preserved I-identity, defended from the attempts of the “developed socialist person’, is still a topical question with plenty of answers. Should the generations, who have survived the socialist dictatorship, be considered as “Lost Generations”, or the niches and the gaps in the system prepared us for the otherness? In the interpretation of the messages, the main focus is on the other reality as experienced, on the conditions, in which their authors find themselves: observing holydays, staying in modern hotels or in homes of labor union, enjoying nature and so forth. This is not done as an aim in itself but is related to the visual side of the postcards, showing what the reality should be. Often face and backs of the card are not covered, i.e. there is a difference between the actual (is-statement) and the normative statement/proposition (must-statement’'). In this case, the visualization includes the subjective content of the evidence and connects it with information about the normative or actual statement/proposition. Photography, in particular in postcards, is a tool for visualization, accessible for anyone, irrespective of whether they are the “creator” (photographer) or the “consumer” (buyer, receiver). The popularity and accessibility of photographs and postcards create problems as far as the appropriateness and the visualization in the exploration of realities are concerned, that is as far as the choice of the motifs is an objective reflection of reality or a product of subjective “presence” of the photographer/publisher. MacDougall’s thesis—that rather than the lack of interest in the visual, the problem has always been what to do with visualization—confirms this (1997: 276). The “wordlessness” of the visual material leads to the ungrounded neglect of the pictorial with the exception of cases in which it supports the depicted object. In the process of work with postcards and photographs, the objects are specified by tracing several interdependent lines: the relation of sender/receiver, the presence of the contemporanceity, the social use of the text, the localization of the message and so forth. Jay Ruby’s thesis that exploring images as objects with their real meaning is a wrong method if we are interested in the ways in which people give meaning to other images (1995: 5—7) pays attention to the subjective and to the otherness at the same time. It is observed how the opinions 2 Here Mauer statement is applicable: “who says “culture” also says “human”, and who says “human” also says “culture”. Travel and leisure are human activities and segments of the cultural model of social reality. They are related to the material culture and are subjected to the current conditions” (Maurer 2008: 13). 2! Ist-Aussage und Soll-Aussage (Habermas 1990). 491
