Photomontages improbables

In these times of world disasters and planetary wars, here is an original way of convening the horrific and the unknown which man seems to both fear and enjoy … These wild postcards, collected along the Eastern coast of the USA, are the result of tricks much older than Photoshop and their like. They show brave fishermen swallowed by trout, giant hares pulling carts, a valiant farmer in a sword fight with a grasshopper a head taller than him … Or pineapples large as a house, cobs of corn that need to be sliced with a saw, cucumbers too large to enter a train wagon, and even a mosquito picked up by a crane. This nightmare comes straight from the fertile imagination of the producers of tall-tale postcards, such as William H. Martin or Alfred Stanley Johnson, active between 1908 and 1913. These two inventors are well forgotten though their visions of an apocalypse seem to echo the very current spectrum of a nuclear cataclysm.

• Photomontages improbables by Alain Weill, published by Gourcuff-Gradenigo, 2011, 96 p., 19 €