Yesterday’s Postcards and Today’s Instagram Photos

Lisbon - Beginning of the XX century

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, illustrated postcards became one of the most popular ways of sharing a journey, a landscape, or simply the place where people were spending their holidays. People sent postcards to family, friends or someone they cared about, almost in the same way that we publish a photograph on Instagram today... technology and speed have changed, but the desire to show others where we have been has not changed that much.

Old postcards are now an extraordinary source for historians because what once seemed to be nothing more than a holiday souvenir ended up preserving fragments of an entire society. Through them, we can follow the urban development of towns and cities, changes to landscapes and coastlines, the transformation of monuments and even the emergence of early tourist destinations.

But there is more... postcards show us people, clothes that were once part of everyday life but which today may appear to belong exclusively to folklore, as well as forms of leisure, means of transport, social habits and different ways of occupying public spaces. On the back, we often find short messages that allow us to understand how writing evolved, how people communicated, what concerned them and even the mentality of a particular period.

Interestingly, Instagram may one day play a similar role. The photographs we publish today of our holidays, the cities we visit or the places where we live are, often without us realising it, an enormous visual archive of our time.

A hundred years from now, perhaps a historian will look at those photographs with the same attention with which we now examine a postcard from 1900... trying to understand not only what those places looked like, but also what we chose to show of them.

After all, there is more continuity between yesterday’s postcard and today’s Instagram than we might imagine... we still want to tell someone who is far away, “I’m here, look where I am.”

The difference is that the postcard needed a stamp, while Instagram only needs the internet.

Paulo Freitas do Amaral

Teacher, Historian and Author