The pier stretches imposingly and gigantically over the water, as if an arrogant, brightly lit city wants to conquer even the ocean. In the background, the wide Atlantic horizon is illuminated by a large and white full moon, making foamy wave crests glow. This is the famous metal pier in the tourist seaside town of Atlantic City, New Jersey, and we see a crowd of swimmers on its long sandy beach. They walk, lie on the sand, and many play with the waves and swim. And yet, we see clouds in the sky and it is already evening. Are they night swimmers? And why is there something unnatural about the image we’re looking at? This postcard from the mid-1920s is a charming optical illusion based on a photo taken during the day but then touched up to look convincing at night.

The book in which it is featured, titled Postcards of the night, is a product of the Museum of New Mexico, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and is A high-quality, elegant 126-page volume published twenty years ago in January 2003, based on the personal collection of historian-geographer John A. Jaikle.

In fact, there is an identification between the publisher and the author: they both have behind them a large number of amazing works and publications that, outside of America, have remained more or less in the dark. In this sense, the book we hold in our hands is one of the many “unknown masterpieces” of world publishing.

“Night lighting has turned the ordinary into the extraordinary, the night has been colonized and the frontiers of darkness have been pushed back.”

Jakel, now 83, professor emeritus of geography and landscape architecture at the University of Illinois, was inspired by the allure of the “American landscape” and has worked all his life to capture, analyze and capture it in words, images and themes. He studied (and glorified in his books) such things as gas stations, motels and fast food joints on the sides of major highways, street signs, garages or railroads. During his long career, he has been a prolific, methodical, and passionate student of American popular culture. Each painstaking study – its publication looks like a small printed museum for the fleeting pulse of the ephemeral and lost somewhere over the years and in the great letters of History. Like a mesmerized explorer and collector of glimpses of the past, he discovered the soul of his country not only in great events and famous names, but also in the habits of many and nameless.

In the eighty eye-catching images of the book that we present here, he takes us on a journey through those old tourist images of night cities, which in all of them triumph over two things: the secret of the night city and the now lost city. the art of painted postcards “My interest in the American night and its depiction on postcards arose spontaneously. At the age of ten (born in 1949) I was riding a train through Kansas on a winter night, shards of light piercing the darkness, intermittent flashes of car headlights on a highway that ran parallel to the railroad tracks. What a deep sense of emptiness and isolation!” he will say at the beginning of the preface to the edition, and immediately after that he will pass from a night of darkness into a night of light when he remembers the glow of the big city on the August night when he went with his parents to the roof garden of the Astor Hotel in Nea York. As he writes, “seeing the view from above, I felt that I was not only in the heart of a wonderful metropolis, but also in the heart of all America – if not in the center of the whole world.”

In adolescence, such “nightly” images entered the family mailbox in the form of postcards from relatives who had gone on business trips. He began to collect them and store them in a box, and although he may not have realized at the time that these photographs were “teasing”, they fascinated him because, according to him, they were not only touching, but also “an invitation to » to go once to all these places.

Many years later, as an assistant professor of geography at a university, he dug up the box and recognized its academic value. “These images testified not only to what these places once were, but also to how they were depicted. They are indicative of how America itself was portrayed,” he writes, and at the same time remind us of something very important: it was a time when the night was no longer so dark as it had been for centuries. “Night lighting has turned the ordinary into the extraordinary, the night has been colonized and the frontiers of darkness pushed back,” he says.

“Social networks” of the early 20th century

Apart from their historical value as a testament to the social context of the time or valuable photographic hints to unknown aspects of the past, these postcards were also the product of a whole machine behind complex processes and productions, be it imaging and printing methods. or the post offices themselves and their services. Historically, postcards have been created, printed, sold, mailed, and received on such a gigantic scale that they are perhaps exchanged between people. You could even say that they are the progenitors of today’s social networks: indeed, we often accompany a short message (or public post) with a photo from the place of rest.

“Image has become identified with experience,” Jaeckel writes somewhere in the preface to Postcards of the Night, referring to early 20th-century America, which in today’s digital age of social media and the Internet sounds eerily relevant. Indeed, in a strange way, postcards still live digitally, but their “attention-grabbing” ones don’t have the former charm of the complex technique of printing, coloring and manipulating photography.

With a little research, we discover that that postcard showing a night shot of Atlantic City Beach and its long pier is actually just a teasing photo taken during the day from an airplane. But do we mind that this operation, processing, is so obvious? Does it annoy its creator? Is he afraid that we will accuse him of outright fraud, realizing that there will probably be no chance that hundreds of bathers will be on the beach on a cloudy night?

And yet so charming is the moon and its reflections over the Atlantic, so magical are the lights on the pier with their attractiveness, that we willingly accept this “sweet deception.” We all agree to deliberate, general deception. Also, why should you care that Halley’s Comet is obviously hand-drawn in one of these images? His otherworldly magic does not lose anything – on the contrary, maybe it wins.

In the post-war years, as photographic media became available that could capture night scenes more realistically, publishers and printers continued to depict American cities at night in color, with huge moons in the sky, somewhere between the real and the imaginary. New techniques left no room for imagination. As Jeckle writes, “Eventually the game of imagination and expectation that the publishers of postcards played with the public ceased. And yet, if the postcards of the early 20th century were not completely honest, then it cannot be said that they were completely dishonest.