"The purpose of a postcard, of course, is to show someone who is not present in a place what that place is like, by sharing an image—a cityscape, or countryside, or wildlife. The postcard thus “straddles two spaces: the one it represents and the one it will reach,” Alloula writes. He argues that the very flatness of the staged colonial postcards, with their plain descriptions of a foreign place and its people, persuaded French viewers of the photographs’ authenticity. But they were not plain descriptions; they were designed to convince those living in France that Algeria and its topless, trapped women were better off being colonized. The colonial postcard engages in the “rhetoric of camouflage,” Alloula argues. It is a “mirror trick” that “presents itself as pure reflection.” The colonial postcard “rests, and operates, upon a false equivalency—namely, that illusion equals reality. It literally takes its desires for realities.”"