ZURICH.-Fotomuseum Winterthur (Collection) presents The Stamp of Fantasy –The Visual Inventiveness of Photographic Postcards, on view 27 October 2007 to 10 February 2008. Press photography, photo books, photographic objects, photographic postcards: the way we look at these many different forms of photography is undergoing a sea change. In recent years, a whole slew of publications and exhibitions on these themes have not only attracted a lot of public interest, but have also helped to bring new insights into the history of photography. In tune with this development, we present The Stamp of Fantasy. The exhibition takes a look at the postcards that brought photography to the masses, as the precursors of the illustrated press and the illustrated book.

From 1900 onwards, picture postcards enjoyed enormous popularity. In addition to urban scenes and village views, postcard publishers also began issuing more entertaining images: greetings cards and April Fool’s Day cards, illustrations of proverbs, imaginary, witty or even erotic scenes. In designing these visual curiosities, the photographers deployed a wide range of technical devices – montage, double exposure, optical distortion, close-up etc. – which, though perfectly familiar to the trade, were still relatively unknown to the general public. The exhibition examines the remarkably playful visual approach taken by the postcard industry in the early decades of the twentieth century.

A fervently imaginative visual approach is evident in the amateur, professional and artistic photography of that period. Many artists of the 1920s and 1930s took a keen and obvious interest in picture postcards. Paul Éluard, André Breton and Salvador Dalí, to name but a few, collected them. Hannah Höch, Herbert Bayer, Man Ray and many others used them as material and inspiration for their own works. Paul Éluard wrote at the time – and the exhibition confirms this – that these postcards, though they might not be “art”, were at least the “small change” of art, which occasionally generated “the look of gold”.

The exhibition presents more than 500 postcards – in large-scale projections, in showcases, in frames – from the collections of Gérard Lévy and Peter Weiss, as well as selected works by Jean Arp, Johannes Theodor Baargeld, Giacomo Balla, Oscar Dominguez, Herbert Bayer, Hans Bellmer, Erwin Blumenfeld, André Breton, Paul Citroën, Salvador Dalí, Robert Desnos, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, Hannah Höch, Georges Hugnet, André Kertész, Gustav Klutsis, El Lissitzky, Dora Maar, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Meret Oppenheim, Roland Penrose, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Alexander Rodchenko, Grete Stern, Maurice Tabard, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Yves Tanguy and others.

Curator: Clément Chéroux, photographic historian, curator of the photographic collection at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Publication: “The Stamp of Fantasy – The Visual Inventiveness of Photographic Postcards”. Ed. Clément Chéroux and Ute Eskildsen, published by Steidl Verlag. With texts by Clément Chéroux, 216 pages, 350 colour reproductions, format 29,7 x 29,7 cm. Price CHF 59.-. The exhibition has been organised jointly by the following three institutions:

Fotomuseum Winterthur: 27 October 2007 – 10 February 2008
Jeu de Paume/Sully, Paris: 3 March 2008 – 18 May 2008
Museum Folkwang, Essen: 18 July 2008 – 21 September 2008