Surveying the 'empty land' in selected South African landscape postcards

Abstract

This paper adds to the discourse around picture postcards by looking at a number of South African postcards and photographs from about the 1940s to the 1970s wherein the object of the gaze is the supposedly empty landscape. These postcards simultaneously reveal and conceal the political and social realities of South Africa at that time by only showing white people gazing at the land. It is argued that the accessible and portable nature of postcards made them an ideal medium by which white peoples' relationship with the land was rehearsed and enacted during a decisive period of South African history. © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.