POSTCARDS TO HISTORY


the islands to a tourist clientele a century ago have more recently been re-
employed to sell this colonial past to the islands' contemporary inhabitants.

Re-envisioning the History of the West Indies Postcard: The Bahamian
Visions Exhibition

It was in the context of the reappearance of the picturesque postcard wearing
the invisible mask of history that I curated in an exhibition entitled Bahamian
Visions at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas in 2003, which allowed me
as an art historian to add a footnote to the complicated biography of the
West Indies postcard. The exhibition, composed of thirty turn-of-the-
twentieth-century photographs of the Bahamas and their postcard
descendents, attempted to provide an alternate vision of postcards from
that presented in the picture books. If the postcard publications had precisely
re-presented the postcards as "history" by suppressing (or ignoring) the
motivations surrounding the creation of the images and by erasing alternate
interpretations of these representations, Bahamian Visions attempted to make
this history of production and consumption a part of the viewing experience
of the exhibition. The show foregrounded the history of the active
manufacture of the islands' natural tropical image.
 Visitors to Bahamian Visions immediately encountered explanatory wall
text, which outlined the circumstances under which the tourism-oriented
photographs and postcards were produced. Viewers, who were patient
enough to scan the eight panels before the photographs captured their
attention, were introduced to three photographers, whose works the
exhibition featured: American photographers William Henry Jackson (1843-
1942) and Jacob Frank Coonley (1832-unknown) and Bahamian James
Osborne Sands (1885-1978). They learnt that the photographers were hired
by an American hotelier, the British colonial government, and the local
tourism promotional board, respectively, to create alluringly picturesque
representations of the winter resort. The emphasis on particular image
makers and their patrons aimed to counter the non-attribution of these
representations to specific visual authors in popular postcard publications.
While the show was divided into three, highlighting the individual vision of
each photographer, their singular focus on very select motifs called attention
to the limited scope of a more wide-ranging touristic vision of the islands.
 Each section of the exhibition contained "postcard modules," where one
photograph was accompanied by four or five postcards permutations of
the same image. The reproductions gave the photographs new "life," as
Susan Stewart puts it, through their miniaturization (Stewart 60). The
modules drew attention to the various devices photographers used to
produce and transform the meaning of a single photographic image. They
visualized, to quote Stuart Hall, the "active labor of making things mean"
both through the active selection of and construction of subject matter