Photographer Alfred Stanley Johnson, Jr. specialized in the tall-tale postcard, extolling Wisconsin's agricultural abundance through images of oversized produce and animals. Staging his friends and family to pantomime story lines, Johnson added enlarged fruits, vegetables and animals to fit the background and included titles that attributed bountiful crops to local communities. Johnson's tall-tale postcards affirmed the American myth of abundance — a myth often at odds with reality.

Tall-tale postcards emerged around the turn-of-the-20th century, when postcards came to function as surrogates for travel. People soon realized that postcards could be used to create or sustain a certain utopian myth about a town or region, and crafty photographers began to physically manipulate their photographs. Nowhere did these modified images, or "tall-tale postcards" as they came to be called, become more prevalent than in rural communities that hoped to forge an identity as places of agricultural abundance to encourage settlement and growth. Food sources specific to the region — vegetables, fruits, or fish — were the most common subjects. Johnson began making tall-tale photographs around 1908 in his Waupun studio, and worked for more than a decade to develop and fine-tune the genre. More ›

Tall-Tale Postcard Prints Available on eBay

A selection of Tall-Tale Postcard prints is available for purchase in the WHS Images eBay Store. Print reproductions are made from high resolution scans of the original source material and are printed on enhanced matte paper using archival pigmented inks. For more information, check out our store FAQ.

You can view all 79 of the Tall-Tale postcards available on eBay by clicking here. We hope you enjoy browsing the over 25,000 images now on WHI. If you have suggestions for a future gallery, please don't hesitate to drop us a line!