Tesis doctoral de Jordi Sarda Ferran
This dissertation is a study of the contemporary city using picture postcards as its sole frame of reference. Until now the postcard has enjoyed little recognition as a documentary medium that could function reliably and of its own accord. Nor has it been viewed as being up to the task of advancing complex phenomenological urban studies. Too often the postcard has been deemed inappropriate as a scholarly resource, a flimsy, pint-sized, sporadic, insignificant and overly popular artifact. The present study shows that, precisely because of their multiple, intersubjective and intimate character, postcards, with their double-sided interplay between image and text, have the potential to reveal circumstances, developments and exchanges involving cities that other, better established media are often at a loss to explain. The major, virtually exclusive source of research material here is a massive collection of picture postcards acquired and indexed by the author over a nearly fifty-year period, a collection of some 300,000 items with images of architecture, cities and assorted landscapes. The unique properties of postcards as documents and research tools and the information and conclusions they yield differ greatly from those of other media. Where the contemporary city serves as the object of study, postcards offer a wide-open, largely unexplored field of inquiry. This dissertation represents an initial contribution to situating this underappreciated research medium alongside the fields of sociology, cartography, statistics and the analysis of photographs, film and literature as well as other methodologies and social sciences, where it can function as a standard vehicle for exploring and understanding city life. In so doing, this study employs the three concepts in the subtitle: vehicle, exploration, and city as a three-pronged approach, with each of the three specific enough. The transmission of understanding that the postcard occasions oscillates between two realms: cartophily and deltiology. The former term has its origins in the french language and evokes memory, nostalgia and familiarity with the past and suggests a renewed interest in the postcard as a medium. Deltiology, by contrast, is an anglophone term that emphasizes description, classification, differentiation and, above all, setting postcards in relation to one another. It approaches the postcard with an almost scientific quest for understanding. If in the former case the objective consists of collecting and remaking the history of the postcard itself, in the latter it seeks to locate points of comparison, and in turn to help us learn to read the city. This dissertation about the city draws equally on both approaches, mindful of the fact that each has contributed decisively to the recognition of the postcard as a vehicle for exploring our cities.
Datos académicos de la tesis doctoral «Només imatges. la targeta postal, vehicle de coneixement urbÁ «
- Título de la tesis: Només imatges. la targeta postal, vehicle de coneixement urbÁ
- Autor: Jordi Sarda Ferran
- Universidad: Politécnica de catalunya
- Fecha de lectura de la tesis: 12/12/2012
Dirección y tribunal
- Director de la tesis
- Manuel De Sola Morales Rubio
- Tribunal
- Presidente del tribunal: Rafael Moneo vallés
- Manuel Laguillo menéndez (vocal)
- carmen Bonell costa (vocal)
- pau Solí -morales serra (vocal)