Picture postcards quickly gained popularity in Western Europe around 1900. The photographs on these postcards represent a wide variety of topics. From the start, the monument was one of the most popular themes. In this article we would like to focus on picture postcards of three Brussels monuments erected in the late 1910s and early 1920s to commemorate two Great War heroines, namely the British-born nurse Edith Cavell (1865-1915) and the Belgian spy Gabrielle Petit (1893-1916). After briefly discussing the monuments and picture postcards in their specific commemorative context, we will argue that these picture postcards, thanks to the use of specific photographic strategies, can be read as what the French cultural historian Pierre Nora coined ‘portable realms of memory’
