This blog is a companion to the The East Asia Image Collection at Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania. It is maintained by Paul D. Barclay, Associate Professor of History, and General Editor of the East Asia Image Collection. The posts to this blog relate to my ongoing research in the history of the visual culture of empire and colonialism in East Asia. The collection contains photographic negatives, Kodachrome slides, rare books, and other forms of ephemera, but the emphasis of the collection, and the research on this blog, concerns picture postcards. Since many picture postcards feature paintings, photographs, statues, monuments, montage, and dioramas, among other media, almost all forms of visual culture and memorialization are connected to postcard research.
In addition to providing research notes, this blog will accumulate a scholarly bibliography of works that analyze, catalog, or reprint picture postcards as sources of history and social analysis, as well as related material from the history of photography and art. It publicizes relevant digital repositories of postcards, photographs, and other visual materials related to Japanese Imperial History.
Please send suggestions for new entries, comments, questions, and concerns to Paul Barclay (barclayp{AT}lafayette.edu).
The East Asia Image Collection is an open-access archive of digitized photographs, negatives, postcards, and slides of imperial Japan (1868-1945), its Asian empire (1895-1945) and occupied Japan (1947-52). Images of Taiwan 台湾, Japan 日本, China 中国, Korea 朝鮮, Manchuria 満洲国, and Indonesia are included. The Collection is built around a core of visual materials donated to Skillman Library Special Collections by the family of Gerald and Rella Warner. Images unique to this collection include the Warners’ unpublished slides and negatives , made from snapshots taken during their years of US State Department service in Asia (1932-1952). Rare materials include prewar picture postcards, high-quality commercial prints, and colonial era picture books. Each record in the East Asia Image Collection has been assigned subject headings, hyper-linked metadata, and, to the fullest extent possible, historiographical, bibliographical and technical data.
Here is a review of the collection on DissertationReviews.org.