"Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard"

This exhibit currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is in three small gallery rooms. The exhibit may have something for everyone, but for those who have a fascination with americana and twentieth century history it's a gem. For those whose experience reaches back to a different era, one before texting, e-mail, and the accessible and affordable long distance phone call, it can recall the excitement of a postcard. That's a trifecta here.

Postcards once represented a pride of place. They were a kind of dispeller of cognitive dissonance to proud citizens everywhere. They were special. Any travel to a new place, an unexpected place, to the West, or overseas, or basically any place that wasn't part of an expected routine, was an opportunity to send postcards as almost a matter of historical record. Sending them was a ritual. Receiving them was like a gift, the chosen picture and the brief note open to interpretation and discussion.

This small sample of Walker Evan's apparently massive collection of postcards and his related photographic work shows the confluence of that iconic greeting and his artistic approach. Evans saw in postcards what he saw in his work which, in the words of one of the curators, was "being able to see the present as if it were already a part of the past".


Note: Busker afficionados alert --- Jeremiah Lockwood was in the Grand Central subway station today, near the boarding area for the shuttle --- well worth it for anyone.