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Going Postal: Photography and Exchange

Prof Geoffrey Batchen

5pm Fri 17 July 2026

Oakeshott Room, Lincoln College

(Free to attend)

Exchange has always been a-perhaps even the-primary motivation for the taking of personal photographs. This paper will offer a history of one such mode of exchange, the one involving the real-photo postcard, millions of which were sent and received during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The real-photo postcard has its own distinctive attributes as an image form, but it has also had a significant impact on avant-garde photographic practice, thereby engineering a formative exchange between the vernacular and artistic worlds. Most importantly, the postcard is a mode of communication in which the sending of photographs generates a debt that can only be paid in kind. In short, a history of the humble real-photo postcard may well also tell us something pertinent about the political economy at the heart of social media today.