Prof Jeanne van Eeden from the Department of Visual Arts recently presented a paper at the 30^th annual conference of the South African Visual Arts Historians in Pietermaritzburg. The topic of the conference was power and visual culture and she delivered a paper entitled Postcards of Pretoria: power and persuasion. In this paper, she looked at how Pretoria was constructed as a significant centre of power by means of postcards. Now produced mainly for tourists, in earlier days postcards were almost the only source of popular visual imagery and were used to inform, communicate and instil civic pride. Postcards from the early years of the twentieth century onwards attempted to create an image of Pretoria based on authority, ‘civilised culture’, and modernity. Discourses based on class, race and gender constructed an image of Pretoria that served the interests of power. The paper concluded that, perhaps unexpectedly, the manner in which Pretoria has been represented has changed very little since the early 1900s and the post-apartheid city uses the same clichéd visual signifiers of power.