The Postcards of the Flohr, Price & Co. House in Colombia and the Invention of a Place at the Beginning of the 20th Century

Abstract

During the first decade of the 20th century, in Colombia, the German businessman Otto Flohr established a printing press in Barranquilla that served as the base for the creation of a prolific number of postcards from different parts of the country. These postcards stood out for their photographic quality, the use of pictorial intervention and an aesthetic stamp that differentiated them from others. The project made it possible to disseminate the images of a territory that, from the photographic and pictorial perspective, was little known until now. To approach the interpretation of the photography, we return to Barthes’s notion of sign, which allows us to establish an interpretive line on the path of meaning (plastic and interpretive intentions of the image) and in the aesthetic and interpretative of a visual subjectivity and aesthetics. The identified postcards allow us to interpret the character of their proposal, of a visuality of Colombia through multiple signs that the photographs represented of each place. The merit is in the creation of these symbols and the dissemination of an image that would refer directly to the idea of the country.