Postcards…not in a Museum gift shop?
The Met has a new exhibit of…wait for it…Walker Evans’ personal postcards. Apparently, the man who would become a great photographer of the 1920s and 30s got his early schools in this vernacular art.
So next time you see a touristy post card just remember that one day these tidbits might be insight into a forgotten era of American pop-culture. I think this is a very intriguing exhibition for the Met to put on - far from the high brow quality of their usual exhibitions, this show is readily approachable and an interesting insight into the life and quarks of one of the most recognizable photographers today.
“This exhibition will focus on a collection of 9,000 picture postcards amassed and classified by the American photographer Walker Evans (1903–1975), now part of the Metropolitan’s Walker Evans Archive. The picture postcard represented a powerful strain of indigenous American realism that directly influenced Evans’s artistic development. The dynamic installation of hundreds of American postcards drawn from Evans’s collection will reveal the symbiotic relationship between Evans’s own art and his interest in the style of the postcard. This will also be demonstrated with a selection of about a dozen of his own photographs printed in 1936 on postcard format photographic paper.”
3 years ago | Tags: art folk art postcards Walker Evans the Met exhibition pop-culture
