Printing disaster by Nicolas Giraud

Printing Disasters by Nicolas Giraud is about disaster postcards, printed after natural and industrial catastrophes from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1960s. They form an inventory of the destruction that followed the development of industrial society.

These postcards come out of nineteenth-century romanticism, with its nostalgia for an unexploited nature, and out of the technological sublime. Both share a morbid attraction to death and disaster. Disaster postcards are a modest, cheap form of the sublime: the destruction of a city or a property is reduced to a hastily printed card. They are bits of history, and they also show a collision between the industrialization in the pictures and the catastrophes themselves.

Old Europe mostly produced black-and-white postcards of ruins, while the United States favored live, vividly colorized photographs, on the intuition that spectacle sells.

There is a double disaster: the event and its reproduction. The appeal of the picture works like a controlled explosion and blows the tragedy out. The event becomes a simple anecdote, reduced to harmless printed ephemera. Beyond the hand-painted flames and the colorized skies, the main disaster is already the picture, working as a screen against reality.