Elisabeth Tonnard

More Than A Few Glimpses Of Its Charms is an installation of found postcards on custom-made shelves and printed texts on paper. The work consists of eighteen different series of found postcards, with each series based on the same photograph. There are eighteen different photographs but together nearly one hundred different used postcards in the installation.

The cards in each series show slight visual differences; the color is changed as a result of age or variations/manipulations in the print runs and sometimes there are visible signs of how the card went through the mail system or was tacked to a wall. The photos are the same but the actual objects and the meaning they had for the senders and receivers are not. The installation is completed by texts in four languages drawn from the backs of the postcards.

Below are some images of the work as shown at the Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, from February 16 to May 27 2018 as part of the show ‘Unboxing Photographs: Work in the Photo Archive’.

A short essay about this work was published in Foto-Objekte, ed. Julia Bärnighausen, Costanza Caraffa et al. Kerber Verlag, 2020.