All images used in this exhibit are from the authors’ personal postcard collections. Picture Postcard Empire was started by social anthropologists Dr Stephen Hughes and Dr Emily Stevenson in July 2018 as a digital corollary to a physical exhibition held at the Brunei Gallery, London, which examined picture postcards of Madras (Chennai) and Bangalore (Bengaluru) in terms of the urban history of colonial India. Initially conceived of as a fixed-term project, more than three years and 600 posts later, the account continues to explore the social, colonial and photographic histories of the picture postcards of India.
Picture postcards are not usually considered to be important historical objects worthy of scholarship and critical attention. They are commonly viewed as trivial scraps of nostalgia when compared to high-market value historical photography. In this exhibition, we refocus attention and seek to highlight the importance of postcards as part of the wider photographic and social histories of colonial Madras. We argue that postcards were the most widely circulated visual mass medium of urban experience in early 20th-century Madras and we aim to show some of the ways that postcards were used to represent the people, places and monuments of the city.
Postcards began at the end of the 19th century as a new kind of crossover between photography and the popular print market. They were the first widely available and affordable form of mass-produced photography. They became a new media craze whose popularity was something akin to the Instagram of the early twentieth century* – an innovative and affordable mobile form of photo sharing and ‘social networking’. During the peak postcard years from 1895 to 1915, one scholar has conservatively estimated that between 200 and 300 billion were in global circulation.**
As the postcard craze found its way to Madras, it provided lucrative business opportunities for both European and Indian photographers and businesses. Many entrepreneurs, from small, local photographic studios to large, multi-branch studios, as well as booksellers and department stores began producing picture postcards of the city and surrounding areas. Postcards of India in general, and Madras in particular, were predominantly consumed by Europeans and it is clear from both the captions and images that they were produced with this audience in mind—therefore, directly implicating them in wider colonial discourses of Othering, hierarchy and power.
Postcards, of course, are also more than their images. What distinguishes them from other forms of photography is that they are also a kind of postal correspondence, which link people in widely dispersed situations. They are meant to be inscribed with messages that might convey much more than their images. Taken together the historical postcards in this exhibition are complex, multi-layered objects that translated the urban environment into ‘sights’ that could be isolated and recorded, dropped in the mail, or collected and organised in scrapbooks.
* The picture postcard at the beginning of the twentieth century: Instagram, Snapchat or selfies of an earlier age? in B Parry, C Burnett & G Merchant (eds), Literacy, media and technology: past, present and future. Bloomsbury Academic, London, pp. 11-24.
** “An Entangled Object: The Picture Postcard as Souvenir and Collectible, Exchange and Ritual Communication.” Cultural Analysis 4: 1–27.
Views of Madras
Postcards are a highly conventional form that has remained surprisingly intact for well over a century and have spread just about everywhere. Many postcards attempted to present an emblematic image of the city that in some way encapsulated it for those who may not be familiar with the place. In this way, postcards reinforced and reproduced iconic views of the city for residents, visitors or far-flung recipients.
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Big names
The postcard trade in Madras, much like in the rest of India, was first built around an infrastructure provided by the thriving business of photographic studios, photographers and photographic practices. Picture postcards were a profitable medium for European and Indian photographers and photographic studios to expand their business beyond portraits. One of the most prolific companies was the German-run studio, Wiele & Klein (rebranded as Klein & Peryerl in the 1920s), though there were numerous others including Nicholas & Co. and Venkiah Brothers.
In addition to photographic studios, there were also larger companies that produced postcards, most likely by hiring ‘freelance’ photographers or purchasing rights to reproduce photographs from local studios. The bookstore Higginbotham & Co. and the department store Spencer’s & Co. were dominant players in the postcard market. Higginbotham’s alone produced between 500 and 600 postcards over the course of three decades. On a postcard of Mount Road, Madras (see above) produced by Higginbotham & Co., the sender has marked the location of the store where he purchased the card with a small cross.
Process talk
These two images show the post-production process that transformed photographs into postcards. The image on the left is a positive print from the original 8-by-10-inch glass plate negative taken by Wiele & Klein, Madras. The scene in the Flower Bazaar shows a group of women intently focused on stringing flowers into garlands. The women were seemingly oblivious to what was going on around them, but the photo reveals the scene of the photographic encounter with bystanders gathered to watch.
Note the crop lines, caption and postcard number etched directly onto the negative plate. It is likely that the original photo was taken in the 1890s, meaning that it was at least a decade later that it was used as the basis for a postcard. The image on the right is yet another version of the original negative that was sold on or published by a French postcard producer at the time of World War I.
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Staged scenes
A large number of postcards at the time depicted Indian people in staged studio settings, posed in performative roles. The vast majority of such postcards denied the subjects photographed their individual identity, and instead used captions to represent them as generic ‘types’ or ‘scenes’. Such postcards speak to the wider power imbalances of the colonial city but also leave unanswered questions around the agency and experience of the people pictured in the studio.
In the postcard above captioned ‘A Street Scene, Madras’ it is immediately obvious that the entire scene has been carefully composed and the children’s poses directed. The painted backdrop and the pieces of the broken pot lay carefully arranged. The young girl cries over the broken pot whilst the boy seems to look on amused. This was a contrived incident that attempted to tell a mini-drama as if it were a ‘snapshot’ of day-to-day life on the streets of Madras.
The postcard below was meant as an ironic joke based on the novelty and presumed incongruity of an Indian woman “Under the Panama”, ready for a game of tennis. At the time, the game was something of a European craze amongst well-to-do women in Madras. On the one hand, there is something playful about this photo shoot that suggests it was a kind of dressing-up game that poked fun at a fashionable European pastime. However, this image also speaks very clearly to the widespread colonial racism of the British Empire.
Beyond the studio
Madras’s postcard photographers also explored more candid styles to capture everyday life in the city. Naturally, there was no hiding a large box camera and tripod, so photographers often drew a great deal of attention long before they were ready to take their pictures. This often meant they attracted crowds and onlookers who looked straight into the lens.
In the postcard above, people in the foreground stare back at the photographer with expressions that could be read as defiance or annoyance. What were these people thinking as the photographer attempted to represent their everyday lives? However, in other images such as the one below of the basket shop, the subjects in the frame seem unaware of or disinterested in the photographer’s presence.
Out and about
Street scenes were one of the most prolific of urban postcard genres. Indeed, Madras city streets were favourite subjects for postcard producers. This was part of the shift out of the studio and further made possible by advances in photographic technology, such as shorter exposure times, portable dry plates and lighter cameras. These postcards typically have a sense of movement, with pedestrians and various forms of transport captured by the camera.
Monumental sights
Public buildings such as law courts and museums were part of the symbolic urban landscape of Madras that served to materially and visually enact the link to Empire. Picture postcards extended this logic of visualisation by reproducing these sites and consolidating attention on them in a manner that allowed people to write them into their own lives and send them to others.
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Postcard palette
Postcard publishers were at the forefront of developing colour images for the mass print market. Lithography and hand-painted photographs were already common colour techniques that coincided with the beginning of postcards. However, postcard publishers/printers developed their unique practices for producing colour images from black and white photographs using stencils for painting and the still-new techniques of halftone printing. Postcards developed their own colour aesthetic that was markedly distinct from the sepia tones of albumen photographic images so common in the 19th century.
The image seen above started as a black and white photograph. It was transformed into a highly distinctive colour landscape using halftone printing on textured paper to approximate the look of brush strokes on an oil painting. This was the specialty of the London-based producer Raphael Tuck & Sons, who produced their ‘Oilette’ series to appeal to the higher-end of the market.
The image above also started as a standard black and white photograph and was printed using a collotype technique. Then, it was hand-painted with water colours, in part using stencils for ease and speed, and in part, free hand—notice the sky. This produced a very common look for early postcards that combined coloured and black and white elements—notice the gopuram.
Taking notes
Postcards are not only mass-reproduced images, but were also intended to carry hand-written messages which could range from brief and banal comments on the weather or wishes for good health, to detailed and personal communications between family members, or commentaries on the image.
Postcard senders also sometimes used the image and their handwritten message in close relation to one another in order to situate themselves in the city, for example by explaining where they lived in relation to the landmarks in the photograph.
In the post
Dropped into a letterbox, postcards became entangled in further complex, local and global networks as they circulated photographic images on a hitherto unseen scale via the postal system. In the early years of the 20th century, many of the postcards of Madras were sent via the personal networks of British residents of south India to numerous towns and cities in the UK. However, there were also large numbers of other Europeans living and working in colonial south India whose postcard writings made global connections beyond the British empire. In addition to these global connections, picture postcards of Madras also circulated within India and the city itself. When used in the local context of Madras, picture postcards offered a quick, inexpensive way of sending basic and short messages in a time before telephones, ones could be posted in the morning and arrive on the same day.
Collectors’ item
Not only were postcards used for utilitarian purposes of communication, but were also objects that were valued and collected in their own right. The press at the time even referred to postcards collecting as a ‘craze’. Albums were a common format for organising and displaying such collections. Postcard albums offer a telling glimpse of how people curated their own collections. But they also speak to the wider colonial context of postcards as a medium that enabled the visual ‘consumption’ of the sites and people of Madras by Europeans.
The album seen here, above and below, contains 120 postcards compiled by a teenaged May Reynolds in Birmingham, UK. The postcards date between 1912 and 1919 and all but a small number were written by her aunt, Annie Reynolds. Annie moved to Madras in 1912 to join her husband Will Reynolds, who worked in the office of an automobile business on Mount Road, run by his uncle Kenneth Reynolds. The album can, therefore, be understood as both a cherished memento of a personal relationship and as part of the material and discursive circulations of colonialism.