William Wegman on Walker Evans’s Postcard Collection

Something will catch my eye and I'll spend more time than I ever expected I would, in the same way that I would in a museum.

I’m William Wegman and my work is painting and photography.

I’ve amassed an enormous collection of postcards. I like the format size. They’re all—what are they?—four by six? I think that makes them interesting as a category. You can compare and sort through.

And I was looking at the postcard collection of Walker Evans. It’s interesting to me that Walker Evans loved and related to things that came to him in his childhood before he started to practice photography, when the picture postcard first became popular.

I’m really haunted by his clarity in what he liked. He really cherished and was probably influenced by ones he termed “lyric documentary.” Evans disliked color photographs. More charming to him was the lithographers that colorized them. He found those much more enchanting, and I do also.

There were four postcards of the Albany State Capitol building that look very different, but if you look closely you’d see the same people are here, and the same cars there, and the flag is moving this way, and so forth. They, in fact, were the exact same card. The degree of colorization of those made them look like completely different cards.

The other interesting thing about the early cards, I think, is the way they retouch smoke and fire, and clouds are always not like any clouds you’ve ever really seen, but they’re postcard clouds. They're kind of cerulean blue mixed with this pale orange that they use for the skyline that you see over and over again.

I’m also really interested, as Evans was, in messages on the back. I feel a little bit like I’m eavesdropping. I heard that if he sent someone a card he would ask for it back. So I wonder if he would plant his messages, knowing that he would have it back in his collection.

To me it’s interesting that postcards, they don’t really exist anymore now that everyone has e-mail. If you visit some amazing place you take a picture on your phone and you send it to somebody. I never was a postcard sender, so I’m not sad about it. But I am sad when I look at a postcard rack and I don’t see any good ones anymore.

People have given me entire suitcases filled with postcards and I've tried to group them into categories but there’s too many. When I do find one beautiful I think back to Walker Evans’s collection. He was inspired by them, so they’re his source material in a way.

I don’t really think of them as works of art. Something will catch my eye and I’ll spend more time than I ever expected I would, in the same way that I would in a museum. I’ll see one thing that'll just floor me and I will not have gone there to look for that, so I like that about having too much.