Greetings from Dutch Country:
Photography, Travel, and the Amish Postcard
“These are some of our Lancaster County Amish people,
Leedon. Thought you might like a picture of them—Thelma &
Billy”'
The postcard is the perfect souvenir: easy to find, easy to mail—and cheap.
A postcard preserves the experience of traveling by allowing the tourist to send
a piece of the vacation back home. In essence, the postcard works as a memento,
a stand-in, for memory. As Christraud Geary and Virginia-Lee Webb have
observed In Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards, it is an
object with many roles: “The postcard undergoes a transformation through the
act of purchasing. The buyer turns it from a mass produced item into a private,
meaningful possession.”2 The postcard’s role in American culture is complex,
but even more complicated is the history of the Amish postcard.
From the start, the photograph has played a key role in the development of
the concept of travel and tourism, including the development of the picture
postcard aesthetic. Ever since the earliest “picture” postcards were introduced at
the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893,3 the world has been fascinated.
Now, more than 100 years later, the postcard remains nothing less than
ubiquitous.
Unlike a private snapshot, a picture postcard is public ephemera; it is a
disposable image for mass production, inexpensive consumption, and
widespread distribution. Its affordability makes the postcard the most popular
travel souvenir for tourists who feel oddly compelled to shop for just the right
card, write a greeting, buy a stamp, and seek out a mailbox—all just to brag that
they are visiting an exotic locale where the recipient is not.
It also strange that—even in 2008—thousands of tourists annually flock to
Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to experience the culture of the Old Order Amish—a
people who dress in unadorned, somber clothing modeled after 18th century
German farmers. By definition, the Amish are anything but exotic, they des ܚX