16 August 2018

Boring postcards are interesting!

Some of my favourite postcards are those that could be described as "boring" but I think they're really interesting because they show an almost utopian view of mundane things like motorways, hotels, and shopping centres, with everything looking new and clean, and all the clothing and cars being lovely bright colours. It's like they are a celebration of the architecture that was modern then but can look dated now.
I suppose I should have realised that this was actually a fake view of the world! I knew there must have been some sort of filter applied to make the colours so intense, but it wasn't until I watched a programme about the history of British photography that I discovered that the colours of individual outfits and cars were painstakingly altered, making some of them more intense but completely changing the colours of others e.g. from white to red.
These days I find that most photographic tourist postcards are just a bit too slick and polished, and I feel they are tacky in their non-tackiness! So I've gone back to my roots and started picking up secondhand postcards from the 70s and 80s with their hyper-saturated colours.

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