POSTCARDS TO HISTORY


exposed another layer in the active production of the meaning of the postcard.
 Beyond deconstructing the photograph's naturalizing devices, the module
put the postcard's century-long social biography on exhibition. The last
manifestation of the viewcard included in the display appeared as late as
1996, when a locally-based artist and collector, the late Brent Malone,
republished a series of Coonley's photographs as postcards. Interestingly,
Malone restored the photograph to its full composition for the first time in
approximately fifty years. He also colored the image in faded pastel colors,
putting a rose-tinted patina of the past on the photograph. The artist encased
the image in a frame composed of straw, a material associated with market
vendors in contemporary Bahamian society. Perhaps the straw provided a
late twentieth-century addition to the ever-changing tropes of tropicality.
Overall, the module -in contrast to the picture books that frame single
postcards as yielding a fixed or transparent meaning- animated a history of
the postcard from its "natural production" through its century-long
reproduction, during which the image, its interpretation, and even its author,
changed.
 While the Turkey Vendor drew attention to the tropical world Coonley
recreated in his studio and how subsequent cropping or hand painting
transformed that image over time, another module focused on changing
captions and unchanging representational genres. One sequence of images
started with a Sands photograph and postcard captioned Two Natives, a title
identical to the postcard I found in the antique shop. While the image was
different from my postcard, it included many of the visual ingredients of my
acquisition: a young black man, on a donkey drawn cart, surrounded by
bougainvillea. Sands would return to this theme throughout his half-century
long career, rearranging the same photographic icons as if they were well-
worn props in a recurring theatrical production. But there were variations
on the theme. One card produced between 1915-1930, for instance, was
creatively titled "Three Natives" and included two black men instead of one.
In addition to slight changes in the visual formula, on occasion the
representation circulated devoid of its more familiar caption. A version of
the "Two Natives" postcard was also published under the caption "Typical
Gateway," drawing attention away from the man and mule altogether and
directing it to the flowering archway. The caption change within the repeating
same representational genre highlighted the seemingly arbitrary attachment
of captions in general, and essentially undermined "the authority" of the
printed text. How did the postcard producer go about formulating a textual
summation of the visual image? What factors, for instance, informed Sands'
change of caption from the derogatory Two Natives to the more benign Typical
Gateway? How, given the changing script of the postcard, should
contemporary viewers interpret the meaning of these images historically
and the more recent captioning (or decaptioning) or historical narration of
these representations?