Nouvelles du paradis : La carte postale de vacances

Nouvelles du paradis : La carte postale de vacances – Since the late 19^th century, the postcard has played a key role in the visualization of the countryside. Initially linked to voluntary or forced migration, postcards gradually became a holiday ritual with the rise of paid vacations and mass tourism.

Faced with increasingly stiff competition, card publishers, veritable image entrepreneurs, coveted the sites they visited, constantly improving their collections to match changing consumer tastes as closely as possible, often adding an azure blue sky to the “ideal” viewpoint… Nouvelles du paradis looks at postcards from two angles: as an object of correspondence on the one hand, and as an industrial and editorialized product on the other.

By revealing the inner workings of commercial tourist imagery, rather than merely providing a superficial iconographic commentary, this book fills a real gap. Conceived as a reference work, it combines contributions from a variety of disciplines (history, sociology, ethnology, contemporary art) to provide a comprehensive picture of the evolution of this disappearing popular object.

From the places where they first appeared (the Eiffel Tower, the coastline, etc.) to the technical processes used by publishers to sell more, not forgetting the cartophile sociability of collectors and the new image-based accounts of vacations in the age of social networks, the postcard is examined from every angle.