New Arrival to the GS Bookshelf: Folk Photography by Luc Sante

Luc Sante, author of that great history of vice on the Bowery, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, apparently collects early 20^th Century picture postcards. From his collection of more than 2500 cards he assembled his latest book Folk Photography, The American Real-Photo Postcard 1905-1930 (Yeti/VerseChorus, 2009).

Clare County voted to go dry.

Sante distinguishes Real-Photo Postcards from the more widespread photo-litho cards of the day, as the former were printed in darkrooms, on photo paper, and in limited runs. They originally appeared as a result of several key convergences. In 1905 the postal service inaugurated the penny postcard rate, and then Rural Free Delivery the following year. At about the same time photography became more accessible to the layman thanks largely to the advent of simpler developing processes and cheap cameras. Before long every lonesome whistle-stop in Prairieville had its local photog, ready and able, for a fee, to document people and events in sepia tone to show to the folks back home.

A scene from the Mexican border war.

This plain-faced popular form, which Sante reminds us was an essential means of communication during its day, was derided by the guardians of more self-consciously arty-farty photography of the time. Alfred Stieglitz considered the subjects of most photo postcards too banal, and their execution too amateurish. However, in his accompanying treatise, Sante argues for the democratic quality of the real-photo postcard. Borrowing crit-speak from Barthe’s Camera Obscura, he insists that the best RPPCs qualify as art, as they possess both studium and punctum. That is, they both capture something essential about their time and place, the studium, while also “puncturing” the viewer with their emotional power.

Pity the Sky with Nothing but Stars

From the Dreaming-of-Lost-Worlds Department, my current reading list:



The big highlight of this romp through the peeps and scumatoriums of old Times Square, by former Screw writer Josh Alan Friedman, has got to be the tale of Plato's Retreat owner Larry Levinson's big bet that he could ejaculate 15 times in a single day (at age 45 no less). Tales of Times Square (Delacorte, 1986) is hilarious throughout, and shows that the big clean-up didn't begin with Herr Giuliani, but goes back to the 70's, to the start of the 42nd Street Redevelopment Corp, and the establishment of NYPD's Office of Midtown Enforcement.




Luc Sante's Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1991) is essentially a history of vice on the Bowery, covering its heyday from the mid-19th Century to World War I, and the passing of the Volstead Act, which ushered in the prohibition era, the Bowery's first big kiss of death. As a history, the book's subjective enough to make it lively, and offers plenty of further reading, if one is inclined to delve more deeply into the subject. And Low Life does what Spengler said history’s supposed to: it adds depth to present reality. Obviously the dives, blind tigers, knockout drops, and hot corn girls are all part of a long gone ancient history. Still, to read Low Life only accentuates how bizarrely out-of-place those new, ultra-modern glass high-rises are on Cooper Square⎯trendy minimalist restaurants on Rivington Street? In the Essex Market? Yo, not so long ago the Essex Market was good for a brush with any number of lures and snares (Dors 'n' Fours anyone?). Low Life sorta lets you hear the whispers of ghosts, if you go for that sort of thing. And who knows? If you play your cards right, maybe even today you could still get sucked into the wrong Chinatown doorway and get your organs harvested.