The CLUI has been collecting (and distributing) postcards made by Merle Porter, since the late 1990s. Merle Porter (1907-1988) was a one-man postcard production company, based out of Colton, California. Operating under a few different company names, he produced and distributed thousands of unique cards over a 50 year career. Nearly always about places, his cards have a distinctive style, sometimes depicting famous sites, but more often they celebrated the ordinary landscape: highways, abandoned buildings, oil fields, small town downtowns. He took the photographs, and wrote descriptive captions for the back of each card, full of historical facts and local lore, sometimes filling up more than half of the card's writing space with his text.
THE MERLE PORTER REPHOTOGRAPHY PROJECT
READ THE WINTER 2023 NEWSLETTER ARTICLE
READ THE WINTER 2014 NEWSLETTER ARTICLE