Barbad Golshiri's powerful 2005 series of postcard-size photographs, "Civil War," uses the many political, religious and commercial billboards around Tehran as none-too-subtle metaphors for the ideological conflicts at the heart of Iranian society.
He also, a few months before his death, sent a friend a series of postcards containing eight "messages from the unseen world".
Even more dramatically, she found a series of postcards in the museum archive that date from 1906 and carry photographs of African women by François-Edmond Fortier.
Scatty, funny and brisk, it reads like a series of postcards from a posh, dotty relative and then – quite by stealth – becomes completely heartbreaking.
Calling themselves the Co-Optic Group, the photographers created a series of postcards that are now on view as part of an exhibition of the Co-Optic archive at the Brighton Photo Biennial.
Here, for instance, is On Kawara's "I Got Up," part of a series of postcards this globetrotting artist sent to friends or colleagues, each stamped with the time he happened to arise that day.
But it is the Guatemalan Jew who turns into the seeker, prompted by a series of postcards from his half-Gypsy friend to find Milan's traces in a snowy, postwar Belgrade.
One catalog was in the form of a cardboard box of library cards; another, a roll of undeveloped film; a third was mail art — a series of postcards mailed daily for a month.
The story takes off in Stockholm, where a Swedish journalist receives one in a series of postcards from picturesque European locales indicating where a pair of vicious killers will strike next.
