Reading Postcard Architecture Against the Grain

A session at the Society of Architectural Historians 2023 Annual Conference, Montréal, April 12-16, 2023 (in person)

organized by Suha Hasan (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) and Vera-Simone Schulz (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut)

Scholars in the humanities and social sciences, including architectural historians, have addressed issues related to mobility. This session will shed new light on the transmission of images of architecture and the city through studies of postcards. It aims to widen our understanding of coloniality and post-coloniality by inviting participants to discuss how photographers, printers, and patrons framed cityscapes within a given postcard; the rationale for choosing what was depicted in the image and what was cropped; how such postcards were used to propagate narratives of development, specifically when they were sent back to the metropole from the colonies; how they were (and are being) collected; the nostalgia that is sometimes associated with them; the role of communities, researchers, archives, and museums in producing critical knowledge about postcards; and how postcards were reinterpreted by different actors. We encourage discussions about the role of postcards in a variety of contexts, including networks of production, constructing narratives, gift giving, monetization, and auction houses. We invite interested scholars to reflect on circulating images featuring architecture; how postcards disseminated cityscapes and iconic buildings. Furthermore, we seek to interrogate and challenge the way that some architectural historians deploy this highly-specific medium as if it were neutral. The session aims to find new and alternative readings of postcards through a deep analysis of case studies of the built environment.

Send us your paper proposals for in person presentations in Montréal in April 2023 via the online submission portal by June 7, 2022!

Submission Guidelines:
- Abstracts must be under 300 words.
- The title cannot exceed 65 characters, including spaces and punctuation.
- Abstracts and titles must follow the Chicago Manual of Style.
- Only one abstract by an author or co-author may be submitted (to either a Montréal session or a virtual session)
- A maximum of three (3) authors per abstract will be accepted.
- Please attach a two-page CV in PDF format.

Online submission portal for paper proposals:
https://www.sah.org/2023/call-for-papers