Postcard Collection at the Met

Wow, how neat is this. A postcard collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art! Opens tomorrow.

Curator Jeff L. Rosenheim of the Metropolitan Museum of Arts Department of Photographs arranges a display of postcards collected by Walker Evans that are part of the exhibition 'Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard,' in New York, Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009. Long before he picked up the camera and became a pioneer of American documentary photography, Evans began collecting the colorized photo postcards that were a staple of early 1900s five-and-dime stores. The exhibition of his collection opens to the public Tuesday, Feb. 3

From the Museum Website:

Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard
February 3, 2009–May 25, 2009
The Howard Gilman Gallery
This exhibition will focus on a collection of 9,000 picture postcards amassed and classified by the American photographer Walker Evans (1903–1975), now part of the Metropolitan’s Walker Evans Archive. The picture postcard represented a powerful strain of indigenous American realism that directly influenced Evans’s artistic development. The dynamic installation of hundreds of American postcards drawn from Evans’s collection will reveal the symbiotic relationship between Evans’s own art and his interest in the style of the postcard. This will also be demonstrated with a selection of about a dozen of his own photographs printed in 1936 on postcard format photographic paper.