Exaggerated Postcards

A Kansas Portrait

All of us have seen comic postcards of cowboys riding jack rabbits, giant ears of corn so large that only one would fit on a lumber wagon, piles of cabbages as high as a two-story barn, and trout longer than the fisherman. F.D. Conard of Garden City was an example of an early 20th century photographer who created photographic exaggerations. "The idea," Conard said, "came to me after a flight of grasshoppers swarmed into Garden City attracted by the lights, and it was impossible to fill an automobile gasoline tank at filling stations that night. I went home to sleep, but awoke at 3:00 a.m. and all I could think about was grasshoppers. By morning I had the idea of having fun with the grasshoppers, and took my pictures and superimposed the hoppers with humans. I didn't do it for adverse impressions of Kansas, but as an exaggerated joke."

The picture postcard presented the possibility to inventive photographers to extend the traditional tall-tale to the photographic plate, and what is more, to devise entirely new forms that were possible only through photography. It brought into being visual effects that tall-tale tellers through the centuries had seen only in their fertile imaginations.

To make a freak or tall-tale card took more work than traditional photography. The photographer first had to have a creative idea. Then he took two pictures-for example, of a man holding an ax as if chopping wood, and then a close-up of an ear of corn hanging on the stalk. Then he carefully cut out the picture of the man with the ax and just as carefully glued it to the picture of the corn. If he had done the job well, had judged the perspective accurately, and cut and glued carefully enough, the resultant combination looked as if the man were chopping off a gigantic ear of corn. The photographer added a short, usually laconic legend, and took a picture of the combination, thus creating a freak photograph that could then be printed as a postcard.

"They say pictures don't lie," explained Conard, "but from the sale of these postcards-the fastest selling novelty cards on the market it seems that Kansas people like a little funny, untruth."