The Stamp of Fantasy: The Visual Inventiveness of Photographic Postcards
Clément Chéroux and Ute Eskildsen
Steidl
English
Hardcover
216 pages
302 x 304 mm
2008
ISBN 9783865216083
At the start of the 20th century, long before the triumphal march of the illustrated press, photography in the form of postcards was all the rage. This volume presents the extraordinary inventiveness in postcard production that unites elements of popular culture with photographic images. At the centre of attention is the intense interaction between the so-called fantasy postcards and the avant-garde art of the 1920s and 1930s, the Dadaists and Surrealists. Paul Eluard, André Breton and Salvador Dalí were enthusiastic collectors of fantasy postcards and Hannah Höch, Herbert Bayer, Man Ray and many others used them as material for their work.
(source: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stamp-Fantasy-Inventiveness-Photographic-Postcards/dp/3865216080)
About the Authors
Clément Chéroux was appointed MoMA’s Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography in 2020. He oversees the collection and diverse program of exhibitions, events, and acquisitions for the Department of Photography. Prior to joining MoMA he was Curator (2007–12) and Chief Curator (2013–16) of Photography at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and most recently he held the position of Senior Curator of Photography (2017–20) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Chéroux is a photo-historian and holds a PhD in art history. He has curated more than 30 exhibitions, including Mémoire des camps. Photographies des camps de concentration et d’extermination nazis, 1933–1999 (2001), The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (2004), La Subversion des images: Surréalisme, photographie, film (2009), Shoot! La photographie existentielle (2010), Henri Cartier-Bresson (2014), Paparazzi! Photographers, Stars and Artists (2014), Walker Evans (2017), The Train, RFK’s Last Journey (2018), snap+share: Transmitting Photographs from Mail Art to Social Networks (2019), and Don’t! Photography and the Art of Mistakes (2019).
(source: https://www.moma.org/about/senior-staff/clement-cheroux)
Ute Eskildsen was born in Itzehoe (Schleswig-Holstein) in 1947. After studying photography and working as an assistant in a fashion and portrait studio, she went on to study photography and the history of photography at the Folkwang School of Portraiture in Essen. A fellow in Visual Communication at the Essen University, she served as assistant to Otto Steinert in the field of photohistory exhibitions. In addition to serving as an intern at the International Museum or Photography in Rochester, she was a curator at the Busch-Reisinger Museum in Cambridge, MA and a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. In 1978 she established the photography department at the Folkswang Museum, where she is director of the photography collection and since 1991 deputy director of the museum.
(source: https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/author/eskildsen-ute)
About the Publisher
Born in Göttingen in 1950, Gerhard Steidl began working as a printer and designer in 1969. Soon the customers of his screen-printing workshop included Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers and Nam June Paik, among other well-known artists. In 1972, the first Steidl book Befragung der documenta (Questioning documenta) was published. From political non-fiction he then expanded into literature and selected books on art and photography.
steidl.de
(source: https://steidl.de/Publisher-0211122830.html#:~:text=Born%20in%20G%C3%B6ttingen%20in%201950,among%20other%20well%2Dknown%20artists.)
