The postcards bristle with startlingly sharp dirt and wood and brick, recognizable as “reality” in the photographic language we share with the picture-makers. But while we grew up with that language, they were still inventing it, and therein lies the thrilling dissonance. Sante notes that real-photo postcards became obsolete when they were “insufficiently aspirational for people suddenly conscious of the great mass of images now saturating the world and nervously measuring themselves against it.” That’s us.

Any journalist could get a quick thrill out of describing a Chinese painting factory churning out thousands of scenes of Venice (known to the artists only a Shui Cheng, “Water City”), copying the details without a clue about what they are depicting. But Hessler cleverly uses these literal views of unknown places to illustrate the uses of information about the outside world in Lishui….

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