Brakujące ogniwo w historii modernizmu: poczta
Missing Link in the History of Modernism: Postal Service

Summary/Abstract: Studies on the visual culture of Modernism and the media at the turn of the nineteenth century have been dominated by the film and the origin of the cinema, whose outcome signified bypassing other domains of visual culture, important for the epoch. Wojciech Michera criticises the conceptions of such authors as Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean-Louis Baudry, Anne Friedberg, and Paul Virilio, by demonstrating their ahistoricism, anachronism, and habit of bypassing the actual social context and reception practices. One of the most prominent defects of those conceptions is a total avoidance of the social functioning of the postal network and its mass-scale distribution of picture postcards. In 1900 the latter were one of the most important media for disseminating photographic images showing actual events, discussed by the author in detail upon a single example – that of a fire which broke out on 8 March 1900 and destroyed the Parisian Comédie-Française.

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