Why I Was Late to the Office

During the January LA fires, many of us wanted to take in as much information as possible about the developing disaster, whether through social media or news broadcasts—maybe to feel some measure of control over our emotional overload. We watched as crowds fled from the inferno in panic, followed live streams of people sneaking into the burn zones for spectacular shots, and were fed AI videos showing the Hollywood sign in flames.

This heightened state of imminent disaster reminded me of the social media of the 1900s—photographic postcards—and I decided to conduct some research on the Andreas Brown American Photographic Postcard Collection, specifically the 300 or so examples from about 1900 to 1950 assigned to the category “Disasters.” The collection, compiled by Andreas Brown, the former owner of the New York–based Gotham Book Mart, was acquired by the Getty Research Institute in 1989.

Here are some of the most intriguing postcards I discovered.

Between 1895 and 1915, when newspapers were illustrated with only a few images, the photo postcard was a popular, mass-produced medium of communication and entertainment. The cards were relatively inexpensive, costing just pennies apiece, and were delivered daily and, in some locations, even several times a day.

Their images and personal messages included reporting on disasters—natural and human-made—as well as their consequences and often heroic recoveries. Professional photo studios, traveling photographers, and a growing number of amateurs snapped pictures of extraordinary events and distributed them in postcard form, often the very next day. So, when a train accident or an earthquake knocked out telegraph and telephone lines, you could use postcards that visually reported on disasters to send signs of life to your family or business partners, much like we used social media to reach out to our contacts during the LA fires. In the card above the sender writes: “The reverse side explains why I was late at office. I just missed the train that wrecked.”

In a card sent in 1915, the image, taken from an upper floor window, shows firefighters extinguishing flames at a nearby building and spectators gathered in the street. The postcard’s sender describes the firefighters’ methods: “The stream marked Ⓧ is a five inch stream from a turret nozel [sic] pumped by two engines throwing four lines of hose into one nozel [sic]. This was effective but they used it too late.”

The photo postcard made it possible for neighbors and other witnesses to report on disasters before newspaper reporters might reach the scene. And the senders themselves might even have taken the photographs and produced the postcards, since Kodak offered easy-to-use postcard paper for home production and in 1903 launched a postcard camera, equipped with the appropriate negatives.

Other cards were created and aimed at collectors of extraordinary views. This spectacular, hand-colored example shows a prairie fire in Dallas, South Dakota. I find it striking that the card’s author makes no reference in his message to the event depicted, stating only that he was passing through and sending greetings from Dallas. This card was probably produced in large numbers to have in stock and was also bought long after the event because of its dramatized look.

Although the card was mailed in March 1910, it is unclear when it was produced; I also found examples of this exact card postmarked one and two years earlier. Because it was used to represent prairie fires in general, its value was arguably more that of a collectible item than as a way to report the latest news. And I’d argue that such images also fulfilled sociopsychological functions: they helped shape a collective visual memory.

Disasters, in particular, are media borne, writes Isak Winkel Holm: “They are culturally mediated, filtered through society’s collective repertoire of metaphors, images, narratives and concepts that governs how we make sense to senseless disasters.”

In this case, disaster postcards from the turn of the 20th century and today’s image-based social media share the same principles: the communicative potential of photography is combined with a short text message to tell personal stories away from edited distribution channels. I can easily imagine mailing similar images and notes in 1908 that I sent shortly after we entered 2025, letting my friends and family in Germany know that I, and the Getty Center and Villa, had survived the disastrous LA fires.