Well the Missus and I trundled over to The Fenway the other day to catch the big Turner’s Modern World exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts and say, it was meh.

(Then again, you can judge for yourself with a trundle, or let reviews by the Boston Globe’s Murray Whyte and the New York Times’s Jason Farago help you decide.)

Whatever.

Since we were already there, we turned from Turner to Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation (through July 25) and say, that was swell.

In 1903, at the height of the worldwide craze for postcards, the Eastman Kodak Company unveiled a new product: the postcard camera. The device exposed a postcard-sized negative that could print directly onto a blank card, capturing scenes in extraordinary detail. Portable and easy to use, the camera heralded a new way of making postcards. Suddenly almost anyone could make photo postcards, as a hobby or as a business. Other companies quickly followed in Kodak’s wake, and soon photographic postcards joined the billions upon billions of printed cards in circulation before World War II.

Real photo postcards, as such photographic cards are called today, captured aspects of the world that their commercially published cousins never could. Big postcard publishers tended to play it safe, issuing sets that showed celebrated sites from towns across the United States like town halls, historic mills, and post offices. But the photographers who walked the streets or set up temporary studios worked fast and cheap. They could take a risk on a scene that might appeal to only a few, or capture a moment that would otherwise have been lost to posterity. As the Victorian formality of earlier photography fell away, shop interiors, construction sites, train wrecks, and people acting silly all began to appear on real photo postcards, capturing everyday life on film like never before.

Featuring more than 300 works drawn from the MFA’s Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive, this exhibition takes an in-depth look at real photo postcards and the stories they tell about the US in the early 20th century. The cards range from the dramatic and tragic to the inexplicable, funny, and just plain weird. Along the way, they also reveal truths about a country that was growing and changing with the times—and experiencing the social and economic strains that came with those upheavals.

Representative samples, starting with Telephone Operator, 1907 or later.

Long’s Place Lunch Car, about 1914.

Man and Woman in an Automobile, 1918.

There’s so much to see – and read – in the exhibit, it really requires several visits to take it all in.

But judging from our initial foray, it’s well worth multiple trundles.