Nicolas Giraud — Printing Disasters (pre-order)

Disaster postcards were printed on the occasion of natural and industrial catastrophes from the end of the nineteenth century to the nineteen sixties. They form an inventory of the sorts of destruction that followed from the development of industrial society. Products of both nineteenth-century romanticism – nostalgia for an unexploited nature – and the technological sublime, they reflect a similar morbid attraction for death and disaster.
Modest forms of cheap sublime, these disaster postcards reduce the destruction of a city or property to a hastily printed card. They are bits of history but also represent a collision between the industrialization shown in the pictures and the catastrophes themselves. While old Europe mostly produced black-and-white postcards of ruins, the United States favored live, vividly colorized photographs, with the intuition that spectacle sells. There is a double disaster: the event and its reproduction. The appeal of the picture, just like a controlled explosion, blows the tragedy out. The event becomes a simple anecdote, reduced to the harmless form of a printed ephemera. Beyond the hand-painted flames and the colorized skies, the main disaster is already the picture, working as a screen against reality.