In February 2000, there was a unique exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: “Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard.” Evans was a titan of 20th-century photography who portrayed broken-down plantations; sharecropper families, and bone-dry Southern farms during the Depression, grimy factories in the North; and the facial expressions of New York subway passengers.
Evans collected picture postcards throughout his life during the golden age from 1900 into the 1920s.
This phenomenon was spurred by the United States postal service’s 1907 ruling that the blank side of a postcard could include the address of the recipient and a message.