Iron Harvest : The World’s Great War Journey in Postcard Images

Iron Harvest employs contemporary picture postcard images to take the reader on a graphic journey through the cataclysm recalled by history as the “Great War.” Before there was Twitter, Snapchat, or Instagram there were picture postcards. World War I—the Great War—was fought at the height of an international love affair with those postcards. Soldiers at the front and their loved ones behind the lines did not exchange emails, tweets, or Snaps: they exchanged picture postcards—millions of them.

Employing five hundred curated examples, Iron Harvest uses postcard images to document the political and military course of the war, and the emotional journey of those caught up in the maelstrom—the journey from deluded romanticism regarding the war-in-prospect to disillusionment and despair as the war’s reality revealed itself.