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"The rise of the Modern city is inseparable from its representation in visual culture, and the most common format for the global circulation of urban images was the postcard. With the development of technologies for low-cost print production, standardized sizing, and routine modes of delivery, the postcard rapidly became one of the great communication devices of the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. Sojourners sent them by the billions to friends and relatives around the world. Collectors displayed them in albums and cabinets as a way to convey an aura of travel and adventure. They were the Instagram and Twitter/X feeds of their time--a new, exciting, and seemingly ubiquitous form of communication.
Postcards carried visual information about cities across great distances, and linked the public depictions on their faces with the private details of everyday life on the verso sides. For tourists, scenes of great public buildings and landscapes provided evidence of their time spent in a city. For locals and newly arrived transplants, the more quotidian scenes of cafés, working class districts, and crowded streets gave their friends and relatives back home a view of their new surroundings, and marked their place in the metropolis. For everyone who sent, received, and collected them, postcards offered a democratic means by which to fathom the urban landscape--to miniaturize, contain, and possess the ever-changing city."