Why Were Glamour Photoshoots Known As French Postcards?

Ever since the development of early, widely accessible photographic methods, glamour photography has existed to showcase the beauty of the body, although the exact types of shoots have changed and evolved, with greater flexibility for models than ever before.

One curiosity about glamour shots, however, comes from a term that was used for them for nearly a century, especially in England and the United States, where such posters and photographs were French postcards despite being made throughout Europe.

Part of the reason for this dates back to the early history of photography. Louis Daguerre was the inventor of the first commonly used photography process, and daguerrotypes were quickly used to take nude and semi-nude pictures of men and women.

least at first, treated as purely artistic studies similar to the French tradition of académie, a nude study used by painters as an aid to depicting the body which initially had to be registered with the French government, although in practice they often had a degree of sensuality that would become the keystone of glamour pictures.

This is, however, why a lot of early glamour images had the composition of paintings; they were officially meant to be turned into portraits or art pieces, although this would soon change thanks to the development of calotypes, a process that allowed for the production of cheap limitless prints.

To get around obscenity laws, they were commonly marketed as postcards, even though many countries would refuse to handle them through their postal system due to the repressive laws of the era. They were instead collected and sold to tourists, where the “French postcard” name stuck.

This would eventually thanks to the development of improved mass printing create the concept of the pin-up, sometimes known as cheesecake photography to escape the taboos of the early 20th century and form the basis of modern glamour photography as we know it today.