Jonathan Taylor
On top of everything else, we now import our human-interest stories from China. Chinese news of the weird—like the recent story of the Shenzhen policeman who drank himself to death at a banquet and was honored for falling in the line of duty—makes US headlines. But longtime New Yorker writer Peter Hessler has always balanced his observations of China’s peculiarities with a sense that the Western world is pretty strange, too. In Country Driving, his latest travelogue, he writes, “Everything depends on perspective,” a platitude that he reinvigorates by viewing China’s modernization from unexpected angles. Anyone who haunts the bins of old photographs at flea markets and junk shops knows both the fascination and the dizzying tedium of wading through images from the vanished world. But Luc Sante, in his collection of some 2,500 “real-photo postcards,” has cultivated a sweet spot in photographic history, when early-20th-century Americans enthusiastically gazed at their social vista, a gaze as intense as its small-town horizons were narrow. His Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard 1905-1930 presents 122 such cards, which were actual darkroom prints, often produced for sale by itinerant photographers or self-appointed documentarians.