In the Walker Evans Archive at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, there is a collection of 9,000 such postcards amassed by the great American photographer Walker Evans who began his remarkable collection at the age of 10. What appealed to Evans, even as a boy, were the vernacular subjects, the unvarnished, "artless" quality of the pictures and the generic, uninflected, mostly frontal style that he later would borrow for his own work.