The ephemeral imagination: the postcard and construction of urban memory

The postcard plays a pervasive and sometimes socially critical role in the formation of the populat imagination and individual narratives of the modern city. This paper will explore the critical potentials for the postcard through the career of the American photographer Walker Evans and decode a series of postcards in order to examine how the devices of recto and verso, photographic manipulation and enhancement, and the mechanisms for messaging, captions, and postage together form a multi-facetted and open-ended means of communication.