Nostalgic images and quick, heartfelt greetings: a compelling collection of American real photo postcards and their corresponding written notes

The hundreds of photographs gathered here—all issued from the peculiar category of the “real photo postcard” (RPPC)—lead us into the meanderings of day-to-day life in the towns and countryside of North America at the turn of the 20th century. They are hybrid images, halfway between traditional photographs and postcards. The original prints were not mass-produced images but real artisanal photographs produced from silver-gelatin negatives developed in chemical baths. On the back, like traditional postcards, there is a space to put a stamp and an address, as well as a few words. Sending an image from home—whether a photograph one had taken oneself or bought from an itinerant photographer or the town picture studio—was a practice that enjoyed extraordinary popularity from 1905 to the late 1930s, particularly in the rural regions of America’s heartland.