Going Postal: Photography and Exchange: A Seminar with Geoffrey Batchen
Powerful Ideas: New Research in Art History at the University of Sydney is convened by Mary Roberts and Nick Croggon and presented by the discipline of Art History at the University of Sydney, with support from the Power Institute. The seminar is a forum for the sharing of new ideas and research in art and visual culture. Seminars are free and open to all.
Thursday 8 October 2026 3-4..30pm AEST in the Schaeffer Library Seminar Room 210, Mills Building (A26), This research seminar series is also accessible via Zoom. REGISTER FOR IN PERSON
A seminar with esteemed photography scholar Geoffrey Batchen on the history of the humble real-photo postcard.
B.F.P (USA), Young woman with dog: “Ain’t this for a picture?”, c. 1907 cyanotype real-photo postcard.
Exchange has always been a—perhaps even the—primary motivation for the taking of personal photographs. This paper will offer a history of one such mode of exchange, the one involving the real-photo postcard, millions of which were sent and received during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The real-photo postcard has its own distinctive attributes as an image form, but it has also had a significant impact on avant-garde photographic practice, thereby engineering a formative exchange between the vernacular and artistic worlds. Most importantly, the postcard is a mode of communication in which the sending of photographs generates a debt that can only be paid in kind. In short, a history of the humble real-photo postcard may well also tell us something pertinent about the political economy at the heart of social media today.
People
Geoffrey Batchen
Geoffrey Batchen is the Professor of History of Art at the University of Oxford. A specialist photo-historian, Batchen’s books include Negative/Positive: A History of Photography (2021); The Forms of Nameless Things (2022); and Inventing Photography: William Henry Fox Talbot in the Bodleian Library (2023). He has also curated exhibitions seen in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Iceland, and Japan. His next book will be an anthology of essays about the daguerreotype.
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