Carlos Masotta Album Postal A Postcard Album La Marca: Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2008, 501 pp.
[KR: A beautifully produced work, conceptually and physically, the smaltz has been rendered very finely, fit cooking oil for the pate de cuisinaire!]
From the last cover notes, first in Spanish and then in English:
“From the end of the 19th century into the 1930s, the postcard became a tool for mass communication.
Positioned at the intersection between public and private, the postcard album was the natural place to store these cards. As the miniaturization of the world was key to the development of modern awareness, the postcard album became the chosen setting for displaying these microcosms.
As a result of picture postcards, the land of Argentina moved from darkness into light, catching the attention of the world in an unprecedented way. The themes of these postcards were widely diverse, though they generally fell in one of two categories: romantic and national. The national postcards reflected purely geopolitical criteria, showing landscapes and cities, cloudless skies, feathered Indians and rustic gauchos. On these cards, Argentina not only began to show itself to the world, but also to define itself.”
. . .
[p. 96] Real Images of an Imaginary Country
Coarsely printed on modest cardboard and costing just a few cents, the postcard at the turn of the 20th century launched a quiet revolution in the sphere of perception and language. By adding image to the tradition of letter writing, the postcard successfully combined illustration and writing, transforming that tradition into a worldwide phenomenon that circulated by the millions. Letter-writing, as a genre, would never be the same; the postcard soon became an object of exchange in the flow of correspondence among the middle and well-to-do classes in society. At the same time, however, it brought in popular sectors who were becoming literate thanks to the expansion of the school system.
In postcards from this period, it is common to find two clearly distinguished types of writing. Some postcards have extensive texts that often exceed the square set aside for writing, invading the image itself. Others, however, contain brief texts, sometimes only a few lines long, some of which rhyme, and are scripted in rough handwriting. In large cities, shops that sold postcards also offered small books with phrases that senders could copy onto their postcards. Most certainly postcards could be considered one of the mass media of the period. The fact that the postcard became popular at the same time as print capitalism (newspapers, magazines, books photography, etc.) expanded is no coincidence. The advent of the postcard expanded the universe of images into a dimension that had no precedence. The formula was a simple one: a photograph printed on cardboard where senders could write a message. Like other print media, it made its way into the sphere of daily life but, by leaving room for the imprint of writing and signature, it did so in a more personalized and intimate way. Besides involving itself in individual, private identity, the postcard also served as a backdrop for social and collective processes of identification, from the popularization of bourgeois uses and customs to nationalism. In fact, although the breadth of themes on postcard images was vast and difficult to classify with precision, there were two general groups: romantic postcards and national postcards. The first and perhaps most numerous group voiced an amorous or family ideal through the presentation of a couple seducing one another or beautiful female faces; this group also presented certain types of interpersonal relations, manners, dress, and urban landscapes. The national postcards, on the other hand, presented the world from a strictly geopolitical viewpoint: landscapes, cities and native inhabitants.
In these terms, Argentina as depicted in postcards, was subject to a peculiar contrast. While its territory was represented without any orthodox classification, its inhabitants—stereotyped and defined with exaggerated features—left no room for doubt: they were Indians or gauchos. As a cultural project, postcards were similar to maps, reproducing an entire country on a small scale. At the same time, part of the project involved the special care and attention the native inhabitants received—inhabitants who had been displaced by the wave of European immigrants. Landscapes and cities, cloudless skies, feathered Indians and rustic gauchos. In brief, the postcard created an imaginary country with real images and that country was watched, read and written on massively. Indeed, the impact of the postcard was so great that both individuals and families began to get 9x14 photographs taken in postcard format that they would then send along with greetings or signatures.
From other countries, Argentine postcards could be seen as advertising for immigration: wide, empty lands or territories claimed by explorers or colonial companies, pacific cities and a handful of picturesque inhabitants clearly relegated to the past by progress. However, postcards did not only circulate outside of Argentina as an image of the country for the world: by mixing with the images that arrived from other countries, they also became part of communications among Argentines themselves.
When the 20th century began, the postcard brought together the independent 19th-century traditions of photography and letter-writing.
By imposing a reciprocal obligation of exchange, postcards accumulated and, hence gave rise to the postcard album as the most natural place to store them. However, the album has its own traditions, traditions that made it much more than a single storehouse. On the pages of the album, the postcard found a place where its chaotic diversity could be organized; for owners, this collection of public images had become a treasure of his or her own private world.
What is an Album
In the first decades of the 20th century, the popularity of postcards led many intellectuals to make statements critical of the trend. In his captious article Postcards, dated November 14, 1907, Argentine writer Roberto Payró, a regular columnist for the newspaper La Nación, wrote: “The prevalence of postcards could be taken as an alarming symptom, as it leads people to throw their money—whether a little or a lot—out the window. However, it is also alarming in that it serves as a ruse, dressing itself up as art and intellect—a sort of refined manifestation of decadence.
“ . . . Luckily, there is not so much cause for alarm, as this custom dates far back . . . Postcard collections are the legitimate children of the album . . .”
Did the album indeed precede the postcard? What was Payro referring to? What was the album?
By the mid-19th century, the album was already associated with women. In 1835, the Spaniard José de Larra attempted to define the album in one of his popular essays.
“An album is a large book . . . Like most men, it should be luxuriously bound on the outside and blank on the inside; its folder, which is more elegant if clasped like the snap of a pocketbook, should be of the finest material available, adorned with reliefs of the finest taste and with the initials or the coat-of-arms of its owner: the most expensive, the most British, that’s the best: that’s why it would be quite difficult to find albums in Spain that would compete with the foreign models . . . And what is it used for . . . ? What is the use of that great big book, this sort of missal, so rich and so enormous, so foreign and so strange? What is it for?
“Let’s see. Like the fan, the umbrella or the card, this oversized book is an object used exclusively by women, an elegant woman without an album would be like a body without a soul, like a river without water . . . The album, of course, is not carried in one’s hand but taken along in the carriage; the album and the carriage need each other; one cannot be without the other; it is like water for chocolate; the album is also sent with the manservant from one place to another. And since it is always coming and going, there is a manservant dedicated to transporting it; the manservant and the album are akin to the nanny and the child.
“What is it about? It is not about anything: it is a blank book. As a damsel knows many talented men in all different fields, the album is a book that the damsel sends to a distinguished gentleman. On its immense pages, he will write a few verses if he is a poet, or make a sketch, if he is a painter, or write a piece of music if he is a musician, etc. In truth, as an object. the album is a repertoire of vanity . . . Many different fountains in which a single Narcissus gazes upon his own reflection.
“Once the purpose of the album is known, anyone can infer the reasons for its origins; the pride of mankind who strives to leave his imprint everywhere, in fact what are the renowned pyramids, if not the signature of the Pharaohs on the great album of Egypt? A monument is the facsimile of the people who erected it, stamped into the great album of triumph. What is history, if not the album where each people comes to lay their works.
“ . . .
“And after all, what is a damsel if not an album at whose feet anyone who passes places the tribute at her feet of his admiration? What is her heart if not, oftentimes, an album? Forgive us the bold comparison but what a lucky man finds that all the pages are indeed blank in such an album! Lucky is he who though perhaps not the first (one cannot always be the first to wake) may be the last!
“The album is never referred to simply as the album but as my album! This is essential!"
In the 19th c., the album was an important part of the furniture as well as a crucial component of mundane bourgeois socialbility. Larra, who referred to himself as “Figaro,” tells a singular story that attributes the album with an origin very different from urban vanity. Larra claims that the album is not feminine and not bourgeois, but rather noble, saintly and stately. He claims it goes back to a Carthusian monastery in the Alps in around the year 1000. The Carthusian Order, founded by St. Bruno as cloistered monks, used a book so that travelers who stayed temporarily at the monastary could leave their signatures, words or expressions of gratitude, as well as a phrase or two inspired by the landscape or by the religious-contemplative experience. However, though the word “album”originates in “albus”—white in Latin—it may date back even further. In ancient Rome, the word was used to refer to a small tablet where laws and orders were inscribed.
Perhaps because he was Spanish, Figaro did not make mention of the precursors of the album in the 17th and 18th century in countries such as Germany and Holland. Although its origin was not noble, saintly or stately, the so-called Album Amicorun—also known as the Book of Friends or stammbuch—was a collection of notes, sketches, poems and autographs that students gathered during their travels and stays at different universities across Northern Europe. In this respect, it was like a travel diary, if less organized and less concerned with writing than with recording the landscapes, signatures and testimonies of those the students encountered in their travels. [No less an Aide de Memoire, see Francis Yates, KR] [See also Alicia Weisberg-Robert’s discussion of “The Sketchbook” as a book of trials, ideas, and ideas to be construed, a designer’s notes of his intellectual property, and perhaps a guide to those ideas, borrowed from others; a fake book in music; a record of scale arrangements]
The Album Amicorum is linked to the postcard because it was seen as unquestionable evidence that its possessor had travelled; he or she had been at the place described and spoke of it in the book. It was like the personal notebook—only a few of which were later published—that Larra attributes to the 19th century; though never the album, always my album, such books paradoxically were rich in clippings from one’s trip and the people one encountered or, in other words, with the intervention of others. The Amicorum is the immediate predecessor, a masculine use of the album.
In the case of Argentina, there was one meticulous album user: Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. In his trip across Europe in 1847, Sarmiento met with the exiled General Pueyrredon and asked him to intervene in his album. “Mr. Domingo Sarmiento: You have asked me to give you my name to be included in your Album. I am flattered by this request; I write you to accept, only because I would not know how to deny you this pleasure, you whom I hope Providence will fairly reward for your talents.” [KR: Is it obvious that to reply is to fulfill the conditons of the autograph without any further conditions?] The letter was accompanied by a portrait of Pueyrredon, one of the forefathers of independence, painted by Carlos E. Pellegrini. Sarmiento entered both the letter and portrait in his album, and wrote beneath them: “First supreme leader. Appointed by the Tucumain Congress in 1816. Met him in Paris. He was a simple man free of pretentions.”
The album was, then both private and public; it was nourished by social relations and could grant prestige and power. Signature albums were used as a political tool to draw up petitions, support candidates or ge people out of office. Sarmiento himself used the “Bloody Album” to promote the assassination of the rural leader Nazario Benavides in 1858.
Given its many uses, the term “album” was also used to create a journalistic genre that included diverse articles that were genial and easy-to-read. In Argentia, this genre included El Album de las Senoritas (1854); El Album del bogar, La Mujer; El album de las Familias and El Album poetico argentino (1877).
In the eary 20th century, when the postcard first appeared, it had but one storehouse, one logical archive. Naturally, special albums exclusively for storing these travelling pieces of cardboard soon appeared as well.
However the postcard album had another predecessor that we have not yet mentioned—one that undoubtedly paved the way for its advent. Specifically the photo album, which predated the postcard album by about four decades. Specially designed and with different types of bindings and supports, the first of such albums were manufactured in France, soon after the photographer Disderi invented the carte de visit in 1858. The carte de visit consisted of a photo portrait measuring approximately 6x10 centimeters that was reproduced in quantity to be handed out as a personal presentation.
With the carte de visit, the ability to reproduce photography became evident and the subsequent accumulation of family portraits in albums came as no surprise. What no one yet knew, however, was that this accumulation of images would become an extravagant object. In 1880—in Germany—the illustrated Magazine of Bookbinders declared, “ When the first book of photography appeared in the form of a family album (Leparello), bound in twelve parts with images on each side, no one thought these initial prototypes would result in an article known across the world, one that has benefitted millions.” Since the photographs were printed on thick cardboard, the album make use of equally thick special sheets that, like an envelope, allowed the picture to be inserted at one end and then slid into a cut-out window. Bound in exotic leathers with incrustations in stone, marble carvings and golden clasps, they were bourgeois furniture pieces, and often displayed on special lecterns. Some included a clock, or—with the adequate cover—served as a book-picture frame that could rest on a desk or dresser. In fact, diverse patterns of illustrated paper were available for the pages: Landscapes from the River Thames, Rosebuds, For those who travel by sea, Ceramic patterns for beginning porcelain collections, were among the wide variety.
The boom of luxurious albums did not last long. By 1900, albums became a popular consumer item, and more inexpensive materials were used to bring prices down. Postcards served to make albums even more commonplace and popular. If twenty to thirty thick, rigid and expensive photographs were needed to fill an album, the new albums could easily bring together three or four hundred cheap, flexible postcards.
Payro was correct, then, in affirming that postcard collections were the legitimate child of the album. In his critique, however, he forgot about the image itself. [p. 101] The friendly, poetic phrases and sayings that filled the pages of the albums were now set down in postcards, thus sparking a new dialogue with the designs and photographs printed on the cards. This was the novelty and probably one of the main secrets of success of postcard albums.
In such albums, a hallucinatory world was born, a palimpsest of manuscripts, autographs, stamps and postal seals, print letters, art nouveau designs, romantic scenes, landscapes and pictures of patriotic figures, politicians, and other celebrities, as well as cities, places and people both well-known and exotic, certain friends and family members and even one’s own portrait designed especially as a postcard in the photography shop.
The album created the collection, bringing together diverse postcards and thus making each album unique. At the same time, the album created the collector, setting parameters, asserting memory and serving as a guide in his/her search. However, the organization and the picturesque nature of the album disguised—or, at least minimized—the chaos, the confusion of the stores where the postcards had been before they entered the album.
This model of postcard album, which spread throughout Argentina, became particularly popular due to the high volume of local postcard production; furthermore, this boom coincided with two important years, 1910 and 1916, which marked the centennial celebrations of the most important years in the countriy’s hisotry. In this context, postcards had transformed the old albums, putting on display the diverse images of a country which, through those postcards had begun to show itself to the world and to itself.
The First Argentine Album
The first album of images of this faraway land which had only recently become a country appeared about eighty years before the picture postcard did, in May, 1820, ten years after Argentina won its independence . . . the prestigious publisher Rudolf Ackermann, who directed one of the most renowned printing, publishing and art shops in England . . . The work was published in six independent folders came out monthly through October 1820 . . . the first printed images of Argentina . . . Ackermann’s publication was exquisite . . . a luxury edition . . . the finest papers and printing techniques . . . The images were not beautiful nor did they awaken sublime sentiments . . . vistas . . . could even be considered insignificant. The author . . . Emeric Essex Vidal . . . had not planned to publlish the original pieces. However, [p. 102] what set these images apart was the fact that they were picturesque.
. . . his watercolors are imbued with an awareness of the picturesque, an awareness that reflected the aesthetic concerns that led the bourgeoise and the institutions of Europe to begin taking an interest in the landscape . . .
In 1791, . . . Reverend William Gilpin, himself a painter, wrote a seminal essay on picturesque art in Britain’s capital city. The repercussions of his work were so extensive that he received the nickmame “Mr. Picturesque.” In the space between the sublime and beauty, there was room for the awareness of the rustic and the irregular, of the particular and the characteristic. The picturesque offered a pleasant, nostalgic vision of scenes that the industrial revolution would destroy forever. This genre was appealing in that it awoke interest and curiosity, allowing for connections with disciplines such as Archeology, Ethnology and Natural History; human customs were listed alongside the landscapes for aesthetic and educational purposes. The experience of the trip on which the postcard was based gave it the appeal of being narrated simultaneously; it showed the city what was still going on in the outskirts. In fact, in the text Gilpin added instructions on how to make a “picturesque journey:” on foot, not for more than four weeks, with a notebook for writing a journal and doing sketches with publication in mind, reading classic works, living an austere life—and not bothering with places that are generally visited in summertime—among other recommendations. As can be seen, the “picturesque trip” was the predecessor in tourism. In 1816, when Emeric Vidal arrived to Rio de las Plata, all of these ideas had been widely disseminated. As the historian Alain Corbin explained, in Western Europe, in the late 18th c., “ . . . The picturesque code grows trivial and degraded. Benches are put up to encourage contemplation and viewing is encouraged at the lookout points and by explicative sketches . . . The multitude of travelers will not take long to realize that it has been subject to a neurotic mechanism to guide its point of view. The traveler or, rather, the tourist must dissect his or her impression in order to stimulate or better control emotion.”
While in Europe the picturesque journey was sullied by standardization and massification, it acquired new impetus in the Western Hemisphere. For the English and French of the period, the Americas, particularly Latin America, was like a chest filled with picturesque treasures that the Spanish Empire had been able to jealously guard until the fights for independence in the 19th century.
More than Picturesque Images
If postcard images partake of this taste for the picturesque, this viewpoint, this way of seeing the world, it also informs the way those who receive and collect postcards organized them. As Graciela Silvestri has noted, the picturesque is not only in the postcards, but also in the way the album is put together.
“The picturesque is the relationship between the postcards chosen and the way they are organized: [p. 103] points of view are contrasting and varied, with no apparent relationship to one another, which may show a neighborhood street, a house made of tin, an Indian from El Chaco, a handful of flowers. Postcards are collected in the same way that travelers at the end of the 19th century (the literate journalists, the amateur men of letters, the men who painted watercolors in their free time) mapped out their exotic itineraries.”
The postcard, which often served as a pleasant image that accompanied a traveler’s account, is undoubtedly the heir to the picturesque. However the massive scale of its use—along with the trend of postcard collecting and the organization of postcards in albums—proved that the world view the postcard enclosed was, at the dawn of the 20th century, more than a throwback to the picturesque movement of the previous century; it had taken on a whole new tone. Its diversity was not limited to the plethora of subjects, but extended into myriad practices and applications, from politics to love, from nationalism to hedonism, from science to religion. Postcards occupied a comfortable spot betweeen the public and the private spheres, and the album was its destination of choice after an intricate journey that often involved crossing extensive territories or oceans, covering an array of friendships, relations, love affairs and others. The album, then, was the location where the postcard was forwarded to the spectrum of social mores and relations.
. . . (to be continued, and the reader is urged to purchase this marvelous collection of Argentian postcards, observations, and practically no mention of the tango, KR)
