DELIVERING VIEWS: DISTANT CULTURES IN EARLY POSTCARDS / Edited by Christraud M. Geary and Virginia-Lee Webb.--Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998.--206 p.: ill.--ISBN 1-56098-759-6 (cl., alk. Paper); LC 98-10925: $55.00. The picture postcard, one of the most common visual artifacts of the twentieth century, has not been the focus of extensive scholarly study as has its cousins, the photograph and lithograph. The literature has often concentrated on local collections, on the postcard as collectible, or on the firms or events which produced them. Although such historical overviews as Aline Ripert’s La carte postale, son histoire, sa fonction (Paris, France: Editions du CNRS, 1983) and focused studies such as Malek Alloula's Colonial Harem (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) have contributed to postcard scholarship, even the Dictionary of Art (London, England: Grove’s, 1996) did not provide a separate entry for this important popular culture format. In Delivering Views, Geary (curator of the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives at the National Museum of African Art) and Webb (archivist of the Africa, Oceania and Americas photographic collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) provide a collection of essays which strengthens both postcard research and cultural studies. The introduction includes a brief history of the postcard: origin, adaptation from the photographic format and its relationship with lithography, communicative function, postcard collections, and approaches to research on postcards and their subjects. In the first of six illuminating chapters, Howard Woody, an art historian, discusses the history, production, and distribution of international postcards, surveying the forces that generated them: the rise of tourism, changes in postal regulations, printing improvements and the emergence of the collector. Robert W. Rydell, an historian, treats World's Fair postcards as 'ideological messages,' linking the development of the postcard with the rise of the world's fair as a showcase of Empire, Progress, and the Modern in contrast with the Colonial Village, the Primitive and the Other. From an anthropologist's perspective, Patricia C. Albers concentrates on Plains Indians imagery in postcards, one of the most common formats for reproducing images of Native Americans. While most postcards reiterated the "epic" view of Indians inherited from photography, lithography, painting and sculpture, locally produced cards provided a very different view of people in their everyday dress and in environments other than the stereotypical Plains. In an essay on the American postcard vision of Japan, Ellen Handy, a curator of photography, informs us that although there were numerous Japanese photographers, few records exist for postcard production. Consequently, the research has focussed primarily on postcards of Japanese subjects, which were immensely popular at the turn of the century. Images of Japanese women, or "Beauties"' dominated, yet the postcard bore no relationship to the popular Japanese print. In a chapter on photographers and postcards in the Pacific Islands, Webb discusses the industry in Australia, New Zealand, Samoa, and the Solomons, where romantic color-enhanced postcards of indigenous peoples were produced for the tourist trade, expositions, and as portraiture. Another interesting genre,
the missionary postcard, documented that activity, juxtaposing it with the indigenous cultures. In the final essay, Geary looks at colonization in Africa and the emergence of anthropology as a discipline as parallel to the development of the postcard in African countries. Production, small by international standards, focused on indigenous people and their "progress" arising from colonialization. In contrast, images of local production, by African photographers, diverged from the international pervasive "missionary" genres and "scientific" erotic content. African photographers depicted their subject in a more sympathetic manner yet some produced cards as negative as their western counterparts: to the sophisticated African city photographer, the indigenous had become the exotic. Each chapter in this absorbing work concludes with footnotes. Full documentation of the 132 photographic sources, notes on the contributors, and a substantial bibliography and index are provided. The text is pleasing in typography and layout and the color illustrations are of high quality--important given the array of reproductive processes represented. The sturdy cloth binding is sewn in signatures and opens flat. Delivering Views is a scholarly work, suitable for academic and museum libraries, but also useful for public libraries with postcard collections. Patricia T. Thompson Michigan State University (on leave)