- Manal Abu-Shaheen
- Vahap Avşar
- Jesus Benavente and Felipe Castelblanco
- Brian Caverly
- Kerry Downey
- Magali Duzant
- Golnaz Esmaili
- Mohammed Fayaz
- Kate Gilmore
- Jonah Groeneboer
- Bang Geul Han and Minna Pöllänen
- Dave Hardy
- Sylvia Hardy
- Shadi Harouni
- Janks Archive
- Robin Kang
- Kristin Lucas
- Carl Marin
- Eileen Maxson
- Melanie McLain
- Shane Mecklenburger
- Lawrence Mesich
- Freya Powell
- Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin
- Alan Ruiz
- Samita Sinha and Brian Chase
- Barb Smith
- Monika Sziladi
- Alina Tenser
- Trans-Pecos with 8 Ball Community, E.S.P. TV, and Chillin Island
- Mark Tribe
- Sam Vernon
- Max Warsh
- Jennifer Williams
- An Itinerary with Notes
- Exhibition Views
- Hidden
- Watershed
- A Distant Memory Being Recalled (Queens Teens Respond)
- Overhead: A Response to Kerry Downey’s Fishing with Angela
- Sweat, Leaks, Holes: Crossing the Threshold
- PULSE: On Jonah Groeneboer’s The Potential in Waves Colliding
- Interview: Melanie McLain and Alina Tenser
- Personal Space
- Data, the Social Being, and the Social Network
- Responses from Mechanical Turk
- MAPS, DNA, AND SPAM
- Queens Internacional 2016
- Uneven Development: On Beirut and Plein Air
- A Crisis of Context
- Return to Sender
- Interview: Vahap Avşar and Shadi Harouni
- Mining Through History: The Contemporary Practices of Vahap Avşar and Shadi Harouni
- A Conversation with Shadi Harouni's The Lightest of Stones
- Directions to a Gravel Quarry
- Walk This Way
- Interview: Brian Caverly and Barb Smith
- "I drew the one that has the teeth marks..."
- BEAT IT! (Queens Teens respond)
- Moments
- Lawn Furniture
- In Between Difference, Repetition, and Original Use
- Interview: Dave Hardy and Max Warsh
- Again—and again: on the recent work of Alan Ruiz
- City of Tomorrow
- Noticing This Space
- NO PLACE FOR A MAP
- The History of the World Was with Me That Night
- What You Don't See (Queens Teens Respond)
- Interview: Allison Davis and Sam Vernon
- When You’re Smiling…The Many Faces Behind the Mask
- Interview: Jesus Benavente and Carl Marin
- The Eternal Insult
- Janking Off
- Queens Theatricality
“Handicapped, the image is not sufficient in itself and requires visual and verbal support, a spokesperson to bring it forth and have it speak.”
—Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (2008)
1 - The merest fraction of the 15,000 photographs of Turkey in the late 1970s and early 1980s accumulated in the archives of the defunct AND Postcard Company ever saw the light of day as circulated postcards in their time. Decades later, in 2010, the artist Vahap Avşar acquired this archive of largely stillborn images and (re)produced a dozen of its pictures as postcards, and still more as larger-scale prints, in his project Lost Shadows, [AND Museum] (2015-16).
2 - Straddling the few years preceding and following the country’s September 1980 military coup—which more forcefully reasserted control of the state after the military’s so-called 1971 “coup by memorandum”—the AND Postcard Company’s roving photographers indexed Turkey’s urban and rural landscapes in scenes both seemingly anodyne (tableaux of anonymous individuals posing in mostly rural or semi-rural settings) and overtly propagandistic (military processions fraught with nationalistic content). Meant for use as domestic postcards to be exchanged among a population fragmented by urbanization and the geographic displacements of compulsory military service, the images gathered by the AND Postcard Company recall the global political history of the postcard as an article of technocratic modernity.
3 - Picture postcards were first popularized by the rash of expositions that dominated the industrializing world in the late 19th century; the Eiffel Tower was iconized in part thanks to its appearance on postcards sold at Paris’s Exposition Universelle in 1889, for example, and the medium’s success saw the British Post Office engage in a protracted battle to preserve its monopoly on postcard production, eventually ceding publishing rights to private printers in 1899 (or, less than a decade after the country issued its first illustrated postcards for the 1891 Royal Naval Exhibition). By the turn of the century, several nations, including Germany, Britain, and the United States, had employed the picture postcard to propagandistic ends, and other countries followed suit into and through the First World War.*
4 - Postcards are double-sided: When printed, they support inert pictures; when acquired, inscribed with text, addressed, stamped (with yet another vignette of state-sponsored imagery), and mailed, they become communication. The postcard’s fortunes were therefore inextricably linked to state bureaucracy, postal infrastructure, and technologies of capture and reproduction, and so, from the very beginning, the circumstances of their creation were entwined with industrialized modernity and the codes governing its public and private spheres.
5 - Returning to Avşar’s encounter with the AND archive, we recognize the doubleness of the postcard in the ambivalent status of his (re)production of these source pictures as artworks, some, as in the postcard series on view at Queens International 2016, in their intended medium, and others as photographic prints, as in the artist’s 2015 exhibition on the ground floor of SALT’s Beyoğlu gallery in Istanbul. The works in Lost Shadows, [AND Museum] are isomorphic to their historical source, even as their status is changed: The pictures are there, but they are both out of place and out of use.
6 - The conditions of Turkish life to which the archive testifies also bear the hallmarks of 20th-century modernity: a population fractured and reconfigured by the exigencies of military and industrial labor. Bridging the state’s desire to manage its public and private spheres and the desires of citizen-consumers to communicate, the AND Postcard Company was on hand to proffer semi-documentary images of everyday life for the maintenance of everyday life. This recursive relationship is literalized in an image on one of the postcards depicting a soldier reading a postcard atop a rocky cliff. Other pictures depict military marches, flags, and banners, and are thus more explicitly propagandistic. In one postcard showing snowcapped peaks, we note a white Renault 12 parked discreetly along the roadside, a make and model marked by its use by the Turkish state’s secret security organs.
7 - “Archives do not record experience so much as its absence,” Sven Spieker writes in The Big Archive: Art From Bureaucracy (2008). “They mark the point where an experience is missing from its proper place, and what is returned to us in an archive may well be something we never possessed in the first place.” What Lost Shadows, [AND Museum] returns—in a newly spectral form—is the quantity of place and use absent in the AND archive, the technocratic essence of its pictures.
*. Fraser, J. “Propaganda on the Picture Postcard.” Oxford Art Journal 3, no. 2 (1980): 39-40. doi:10.1093/oxartj/3.2.39.