Tall-tale Postcards

– Kacie Lucchini Butcher: Nick, look what I found at the antique store.

– Nick Hoffman: Whoa!

Well, it looks like these are black and white photographs of… – Giant fruits and vegetables.

Do you know what this means?

If there are giant fruits and vegetables and giant animals, then there must be giant people.

We’re on the brink of a major discovery!

– Oh, hold on, hold on.

I’m looking at these and I’m wondering if these were somehow faked.

– But they’re from, like, 1913.

They’re practically as old as you.

They didn’t even have the technology back then.

How would they be faked?

– Are you saying I’m old?

[zing] – Not as old as these lovely antique photos.

– Okay, but we really should figure out if somehow these were faked.

And if so, why the heck would anybody do this?

– Well, if we were going to research it, where would we start?

– How about an old photo studio?

– All right, let’s go take a visit.

[upbeat music] – David Rambow: Welcome to the magic light of the H.H.

Bennett Studio.

This place was built in 1875, and it’s been operated as a photo portrait studio ever since.

– Wow, and who ran the studio?

– A man named Henry Hamilton Bennett.

– So when did people start taking photographs?

– As early as the 1830s.

In 1839 in Paris, France, a gentleman named Louis Daguerre worked along with other people at the same time, and they invented a process that was named the Daguerreotype after him.

– So Dave, we have some photographs from the 19-teens.

How would photography have changed by then?

What was it like?

– That’s so recent.

[all laughing] – Yes.

– People were having more fun with photography.

It was more whimsical sometimes and fun, and showing what you could do to manipulate a photo to make it fun.

– Nick and I have been talking about this, but we need you to help us answer a question.

Could you fake photos before we had the technology to do it?

– You mean like Photoshop today?

– Yes.

– Yes, you could.

Not easily, but it was possible.

– When we think of old photographs today, we often think of boring old portraits.

Did anybody even smile back then?

But this is not the full story.

Photographers have been having fun and making fake images for over a century.

We even found a book from 1891 that talks about all the fun ways to fake things in photographs.

You could do a double exposure where you take two pictures on the same piece of film, or use props.

Sometimes this was done to trick people into thinking there were ghosts or spirits in the images.

And sometimes, it was done just for the laughs.

– Dave, we have these photographs, and we’re wondering if you can tell us a little bit about them.

– Well, they’re images on paper.

Well, looking at the back, there’s a stamp, an address, and a message.

These are postcards.

– Why didn’t we look at the back?

– Forgot to look at the back.

– I guess we have to go learn more about postcards.

– We get to talk about my favorite thing in the world, The United States Postal Service.

– Postcards as we know them date all the way back to the 1860s, but the postcard boom didn’t start until around 1900.

Why?

Well, two big factors were changes in photography and in mail delivery.

Cheaper, easy-to-use cameras helped drive the popularity of photo postcards.

Both amateurs and professionals benefited from this and could make postcards.

Remember that most people back then didn’t own a lot of photographs.

Maybe some family portraits, but often, that was it.

Postcards were suddenly a way to have lots of pictures of things.

Landscapes, famous people, city views, and more.

People collected postcards into albums and boxes and showed them to family and friends.

Oh, and sometimes, they mailed them.

[bright music] [water splashing] [chime] – I’m a huge fan of the United States Postal Service.

I’ve even got a USPS tattoo.

So looking into this part of the story was a lot of fun.

These days, it’s pretty common to get mail delivered right to our front door.

But in the 1800s, people who lived outside of cities often had to travel to pick up their mail.

All this changed with Rural Free Delivery starting in the 1890s.

By the early 1900s, most people in the U.S. had home mail delivery.

Postcards were a cheaper way to send mail.

Just one penny, or half the price of a regular stamp.

This is all part of the context that led to the golden age of postcards in the early 1900s.

In 1913 alone, Americans sent nearly one billion postcards!

And this is around the time when these postcards with images of giant produce or animals became popular.

Today, we call them tall-tale postcards or exaggeration postcards.

Okay, Nick, here’s what I found doing a little research at the Wisconsin Historical Society.

They have a ton of tall-tale postcards.

– That’s awesome; tell me more.

– Now, let me show you what I think is going on.

Next slide, please.

So it starts like this.

Next slide.

Huge fruit.

– Whoa, so in the first one, they were holding up a cutout shaped like a watermelon.

In this one, it looks like a big watermelon.

– I think we’re onto something.

Next slide.

Once again, you have this kid right here.

Next slide.

Poof, giant vegetables.

So somehow what I think they were doing was combining photographs to make it seem like there was large fruit and vegetables.

– So that means that they really were faking this.

But how?

– I really don’t know.

So I think we should go talk to a photographer and figure it out.

[zap] Hey, are you Tomiko?

– Yeah, hi.

– Hi, I’m Kacie.

I’m the one who’s been emailing you.

– Neat, okay.

– So I was hoping that you could help me with some questions I have about photography.

– Happy to answer questions.

– So what are the basic steps of getting a photograph?

– Yeah, well, photography means writing with light.

So if you’re using a digital camera, your image would go onto what’s called your sensor.

But in the old days before we had digital, it would go onto a piece of film that was covered with a silver halide material and the light would write an image onto that.

And that’s what we call the negative.

So once we have a negative, now we wanna make a positive, which would be our print.

So we’re gonna take that negative and put it in the enlarger and shine light through it again.

And once that happens, that negative on the paper turns into a positive.

– Wow, this seems like it’s gonna be kind of a process.

– It is; it’ll be a fun one though.

– Okay, great.

[chuckling] Here’s how the tall-tale postcard photos were made without any computers.

First, you took a photo of the background and the people.

Next, you took a photo of the fruit or vegetable or animal.

It had to be close up so you could make it look really big.

Then you carefully cut out the things from the second photo.

You then pasted these in the first photograph, like a collage.

Finally, you took another photo, this time of the composition you had just made.

And voil, a tall-tale photo.

You could then print copies of this to sell as a postcard.

This was the method used by a photographer named Alfred Stanley Johnson, Jr. from Waupun, Wisconsin.

He started making his tall-tale postcards around 1909, and they were a big success.

His work was so good that he’s now remembered as one of the best tall-tale photographers.

Once we figured out that these were tall-tale postcards, we were able to do some research on them in the library.

Here’s what we learned.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, there were lots of myths about how the Midwest was a huge land of easy farming.

Photography and postcards played a big role in promoting this myth.

This made people excited to move to the area, but the reality was way different.

There was bad weather, years without enough rain, insects, bank failures, and more.

Life was way more challenging than people were led to believe.

[chime] – One way Midwesterners coped with these hardships was by telling tall tales or exaggerated stories.

Like when fishers say they caught the biggest fish ever, but it really was just a minnow.

These tall tales were usually meant to be funny and not taken seriously.

[camera shutter clicking] – Tall-tale postcards were like photo versions of the exaggerated stories people told.

They showed gigantic harvests, huge fish, and animals that look like something out of a monster movie.

Oftentimes, there were also short phrases that were part of the joke, like on this one, which has the caption “Bringing in the sheaves, a common scene on an Oklahoma farm.”

It’s meant for humor.

There’s nothing common about this.

Life may have been tough, but the funny images turned this around and helped people laugh at hardships.

All this helps explain the motivation for and the popularity of tall-tale postcards.

– I learned a lot about early photography.

I also was really surprised to learn that you could manipulate photography.

– You really had to know the kind of art or science behind a photograph to be able to know how to manipulate and how to fake one.

It really took a lot of skill to fake a photograph.

– Yeah, you had to be a photographer or other folks who really knew their way around a camera.

– Changes in photography and mail delivery helped drive a postcard golden age in the early 1900s.

Tall-tale postcards were a part of this.

They presented an exaggerated and idealized portrait of life in the Midwest.

One that was generally way different from reality.

Today, we still love manipulating images for fun, but fake images are also a big problem, which is why we’ve gotta be super careful anytime we’re looking at images.

Being a good historian means looking closely, asking questions, and checking in with experts.

Try making your own tall-tale images.

When you’re done, share your work with your friends, just like people did with postcards over a hundred years ago.

[shutter snapping] Season two.

– There we go.

[David laughing] [beeping] – Nick, look at these photos.

[laughing] I can’t, sorry.

[beeping] [Nick laughing]