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A-maize-ing Grain!

Raid twenty-nine tons of free corn at the National Sweetcorn Festival this week in Hoopeston, Illinois!

If you cannot make it to McFerron Park in Hoopeston, then maybe our humorous photograph can suffice!

The comic phenomenon of tall-tale postcards developed around the turn of the twentieth century. They served as a relief from the harsh realities of midwestern agricultural life—from grasshopper plagues to drought and floods—while also satirizing the idealized pictures that had lured people west a generation earlier.

Today's artist William H. "Dad" Martin perfected the technique of photomontage. Cutting and pasting together pieces from different photographs, he composed an out-of-scale scene in which tiny people were juxtaposed with immense images of produce or game. He then rephotographed this altered image and printed it on postcard stock. Western settlers often sent Martin's popular images back east to friends and relatives, who collected them in albums for family entertainment.

Learn more about early photography in our online exhibition American Photographs: The First Century.

Source: Merry A. Foresta, American Photographs: The First Century, Washington: National Museum of American Art, 1996.

Pictured: W. H. Martin, 1865–1940, Riding a Giant Corncob to Market, 1908, silver print on paper, 3 1/2 x 5 1/2 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment.