MARK GOODMAN/Blurb Book #6. [2018] From Izzy: And yet, I am able to hold in my hand a group of real-photo postcards taken of my grandfather as a young man between 1915 and 1919, and also his 1912 Russian passport picture as a fourteen-year-old. All of the postcard photographs without his future wife were made in downtown Boston at the Comet Photo Studio, located at 1108 Washington Street, and after 1915, at number 1003, near his two older brothers’ shops. At first, I thought the two men in these pictures with my grandfather were his cronies and not family members, but when I discovered that his brothers’ cigar and tailor shops were almost next door to the photographer (Izzy lived and worked three and half miles away, across the Charles River in the Central Square section of Cambridge), it seemed it must be them. Why did he have these pictures taken almost twice a year? Photographs such as these were intended to show a person’s physiognomy and reveal (at least generically or symbolically) how they wished to be seen, or how the photographer was able to please them. “This is me, here I am, and you can see for yourself how lucky I am.”