“We have received mysterious postcards, addressed to the citizens of our virulent times. They are visual
stories of epidemics that affect our present and recent past on this planet. 
A message? A suggestion? A warning or a joke of the space-time dimension?
Who cares. Here they are.”
- Nicola Bertasi
Pandemic Postcards was born, like the best stories, out of a chance encounter. During the first period of
confinement due to Covid-19, the photographer Nicola Bertasi, during his research, came across an
American public photo archive in which he found evidence of some significant moments of the Spanish flu of
1918-19 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, banned signs and makeshift hospitals, were 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 suddenly became indispensable to face the emergency.
The Pandemic Postcards are based on a continuous parallelism of elements and events that, almost for an
ironic game of fate, follow each other is 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 after a century, turned out to be too
many.