The winter squash is looking plentiful this year, just in time for one’s holiday table. In the above image, three children smile while sitting atop a giant, winter squash (perhaps a hubbard?) in what purports to be Beaver Dam.
Waupun photographer Alfred Stanley Johnson Jr., specialized in this type of image, known as a tall-tale postcard. Johnson staged his family and friends and then added enlarged fruits, vegetables, and animals to fit the storyline. His titles attributed these bountiful harvests to the local community, and affirmed the American myth of abundance.
Tall-tale postcards emerged in the early 20th century, when postcards functioned as armchair travel. Soon, photographers like Johnson realized they could manipulate the images to create a kind of utopian image of a place. These images became particularly popular in rural areas where communities hoped to encourage settlement and economic growth. A form of town boosterism, they seemed to imply, “If you move here, your squash is going to be huge.”
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The process for creating tall-tale postcards was fairly simple. A photographer would take one photo of a background landscape and a second image of an object in close-up. Then, he would cut out the second image and place it on top of the first and reshoot the combination to create a final image.
Johnson began making his images around 1908 and continued for more than a decade. His work grew in sophistication and style with each year as he made cards showing cows leaping over roads and a man pushing a wheelbarrow with a giant onion.
Tall-tale postcards were all the rage until World War I, when they slowly faded away.
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