Nicola Bertasi
Pandemic Postcards
(Self, 2021)
booksigning with display

We’ll be waiting for you on friday, May 21st from 7 to 9 p.m.

Pandemic Postcards was born, like the best stories, out of a chance encounter. In the first period of confinement due to Covid-19, photographer Nicola Bertasi, during his research, came across an American public photo archive in which he found evidence of some significant moments of the 1918-19 Spanish flu in the United States.

As in a foggy and confused dream, those images of the beginning of the 20th century populated by figures with masks, signs with prohibitions and makeshift hospitals, have mixed and overlapped not only with the dramatic and daily images of the media, but also with the bombardment of commercial announcements and banners of new products that have suddenly become indispensable to face the emergency.

The Pandemic Postcards are based on a continuous parallelism of elements and events that, almost by an ironic game of fate, follow each other both visually and in fact, very similar between present and past. For this reason, their birth was a spontaneous act that Nicola Bertasi could not avoid: the aesthetic and substantial similarities between the two pandemics and their impact on society, even if a century apart, turned out to be too many.

The book:

Nicola Bertasi
Pandemic Postcards (self, 2021)
10 postcards in cardboard box, 12×18 cm
Edition of 1000
22€ – get your signed cardboard box here