Real Photo Postcard Portraits
Real photo postcards were used for portraits as well as scenery. In this report, we will focus just on the portraits, as that seems to have been the most popular use for real photo postcards when they were first introduced at the beginning of the 20th century.
We will further limit this study to non-celebrity portraits by jumping to the somewhat unwarranted assumption that celebrity photos will have the name of the subject printed on the face of the card. In fact, that is not always true, but the exceptions are few enough that we can disregard their impact on our analysis.
It is well known that real-photo postcards were introduced around 1900, and are still produced today. Our interest in this report is to examine the percentage of dated photographs that are real-photo portraits, to see when the ‘fad’ peaked in popularity.