Merle Porter Postcards
Territory in Photo-Color
Merle Porter was a one man post card production company producing and distributing millions of cards over a 50 year career. Nearly always about places, his cards have a distinctive style, sometimes depicting famous sites, but more often a sort of celebration of the ordinary landscape: highways, abandoned buildings, and oil fields.
Known as "the postcard king of the west," Porter was on the road at least 9 months a year, distributing cards to remote motels, gas stations and souvenir shops, while constantly shooting images for new cards with his 4x5 Speed Graphic camera. Typically his route took him through the California, Arizona and Nevada desert areas in winter, and the California beach areas in summer; his aversion to big cities kept his work out of major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles and San Francisco. At the height of his career, Porter was putting 1,000 miles a week on his Ford Econoline van (which served both as living quarters and portable inventory room), and circulating one million cards a year, under the name Royal Pictures of Colton, California.
Merle Porter was a one man post card production company producing and distributing millions of cards over a 50 year career. Nearly always about places, his cards have a distinctive style, sometimes depicting famous sites, but more often a sort of celebration of the ordinary landscape: highways, abandoned buildings, and oil fields.
Known as "the postcard king of the west," Porter was on the road at least 9 months a year, distributing cards to remote motels, gas stations and souvenir shops, while constantly shooting images for new cards with his 4x5 Speed Graphic camera. Typically his route took him through the California, Arizona and Nevada desert areas in winter, and the California beach areas in summer; his aversion to big cities kept his work out of major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles and San Francisco. At the height of his career, Porter was putting 1,000 miles a week on his Ford Econoline van (which served both as living quarters and portable inventory room), and circulating one million cards a year, under the name Royal Pictures of Colton, California.
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