46 KRISTA A. THOMPSON

 Cognizant of how local interpretations had been written out of the postcard
 archive, museum visitors were invited to leave their own captions, names,
 and addresses on (caption-less) reproductions of the Two Natives and On
 the Way to Market postcards. The commentaries remained on view in the
 exhibition supplementing, indeed becoming an integral part of, the visual
 history of the images. How would contemporary Bahamian viewers respond
 to the Two Natives image my grandmother so detested? Might a local museum-
 goer recognize some of the postcardized personages and identify
 photographic subjects who had been rendered anonymous caricatures in
 the visual economy of tourism? Could the public postcards function as
 private mementoes of a family member, offering viewers an unexpected
 glimpse of a loved one?
 While many exhibition visitors' commentaries were not revelatory in the
ways I anticipated, they did reveal an interesting new interpretative chapter
in the biography of the postcards. If the postcard publications invoked a
colonial nostalgia, several captions revealed that viewers framed the images
as respectable representations of hard-working black or "African," as one
museum-goer specified, Bahamians. As a resident of Fresh Creek, Andros
explained on the back of the On the Way to Market postcard, "This woman
looks as though she is struggling to make enough money to buy food. She
look like she need special help, but will be successful through all her trials."
Another museum-goer from Nassau reiterated, "Hard days work is never
done." A California resident added, "He knows how much we can bear."
Despite the woman's seeming tribulations, many museum visitors interpreted
the woman as a "Strong black woman." Similar sentiments regarding
economic toil were expressed on the back of the Two Natives image, where
one visitor from Fort Lauderdale wrote, "Earning his keep 'another day,
another dollar.'" The images, which circulated as commodities in the leisure
industry at the turn of the twentieth century, were primarily interpreted as
documents of black labor and hardship.
 Some exhibition visitors were specifically attentive to the labor of blacks
as photographic subjects and the circumstances surrounding their
"postcardization." One resident of Cable Beach, Nassau, tried to recreate
the turkey vendor's thoughts as Coonley positioned her in front of the camera's
viewfinder: "I'm tired and dislike my photo being taken!" Such a comment
thoroughly denaturalized the picture-taking process and cast a spotlight on
the power relations between the photographer and his photographic subject.
What did the vendor make of her sudden place on the photographer's stage?
What did she understand, what did Coonley reveal, about the fate of her
photographic image? Did she ever walk, in the course of her daily routine, by
a store and see her own visage staring out at her from a postcard rack? Would
such an encounter be disquieting or heartening? The museum commentator's
remarks, however, do not convey victimhood, but defiance. They plainly
suggest that within the complex and unknowable circumstances that led to