Postcard/Digital Design

Presented here is an overview of the production of picture postcards in the early twentieth century by Curt Teich & Company, a significant manufacturer and industry player during that time. Artifacts from the Curt Teich Archives in Wauconda, IL, are presented, demonstrating how black-and white photographs were transformed into visually and rhetorically vivid, full-color, ready-to-mail scenic views of Any-town, USA. Finally, suggestions are presented for how these artifacts can be used in the classroom to frame discussion about the many facets of design in the digital age.

In 1898, the US government passed the Private Mailing Card Act (PMCA), allowing privately printed postal cards that adhered to certain physical specifications to be mailed anywhere in the country for one cent—half the cost of mailing an enveloped letter. For the previous 25 years, the only postal cards that benefited from this lowered rate were those printed by the government and sold in the post office. The PMCA ushered in a golden era for postcard producers, consumers, and collectors alike, with the American public purchasing and mailing cards in the hundreds of millions--and into the billions--annually in the wake of the act.

Picture postcards often retailed for one cent apiece, making them an immensely affordable commodity and accessible means of communication in an era with few telephones, fewer radios, and no email. Postcards constituted what Kathleen Yancey has called a “thoroughly democratic genre,” facilitating a convenient and relatively instantaneous mode of communication among peoples from a wide swath of the American population. Responding to this market demand was a gluttonous supply of printed scenes and attractions from all over the country. So thorough was the visual coverage that the famous photographer Walker Evans later called picture postcards from the early twentieth century “some of the truest visual records ever made of any period” (Fortune May 1948).

Postcard producers flourished, and the most successful among them were those companies that were able to employ their production technologies and processes to recreate lifelike colors during a time when color photography was still in its infancy. Curt Teich & Company, a Chicago-based corporation eponymously founded by an immigrant German in 1898, was a pioneer of the picture postcard genre and among the most innovative--and most successful--players in the industry. In its eighty years of operation, Teich & Company created over 300,000 unique views. From a compositionist's perspective, their production methods are a fascinating testament to a compelling chapter in the the history of multimodal composing. In their heydey, the work that Teich's hired army of artists conducted to transform black and white photographs into full-color picture postcards can be divided into two main areas: alterations and coloration.

Since the photographs that formed the basis of picture postcards during this era were black and white, the color of each element in the photograph was specified by the order in a sort of color-by-number procedure. Ralph Teich described this procedure best when he wrote, in a set of notes he composed for the Curt Teich Archives, that the customer “would note all variables –for example if a tree had red leaves instead of green he would indicate it. The same for the color of the building, clothes, cars, etc. Everything that was important color wise had to be marked. Because our art department could not guess” (p. 1). These customer-authored notes were most often made by means of a sheet of tissue paper, overlaid on the photograph, that the customer would mark according to a numbered color chart—an example of which can be seen here—assigning “each individual color that he wanted with the appropriate number from the color chart” (Watkins, 1974, p. 4).

Adding color systematically to black and white photographs was a complex and time-consuming process. To begin the process, a glass plate negative was made by photographing the airbrushed/edited photograph. Five prints (one for each color) were then made and sent to the art department, where experienced artists would apply various shades of a red opaque paint to the prints to block out that color in images recorded on special negatives that would be used to produce the respective printing plates (which early on were stone, but were later copper) for each color. To “oversimplify,” wrote Ralph Teich in his notes, for a “bright yellow car, the yellow plate would be left alone[, but] the black, blue, [and] red plates would have a red tint sprayed over the car. Each artist had the break down of how to achieve each numbered color [on the chart]” (Teich, n.d., p. 3). A glass plate negative was then made for each color through a halftone screen, and those negatives were used to make the copper press plates. “After those plates are made,” reads the Sales Pointers manual, “the cards are lithographed in five colors on one side and one color on the reverse.