I recently printed three images at 6 by 4 inches size. Why, I hear you asking. Well, the committee of the Canberra Photographic Society decided to have Holiday Postcards as the subject for its monthly Exhibition & Critique meeting – you might know such a meeting as Competition night at your club, but ours removed the use of the term “competition” some years ago and does not have an arrangement whereby members accumulate points towards an end of year trophy. (A score out of 5 is given to each entry and those given scores of 4 or more increase the number of entries their owners can submit to the Print of the Year event.) All entries for this meeting had to be printed A6, 6×4 or 5×7. There were no separate Open entries and no Projected Images this month.
Digital copies of our prints had to be uploaded to an online gallery so that members participating only via Zoom could see them whilst they were being exhibited and critiqued in the club’s meeting room. But the guest critic only saw the actual prints on the wall of the room.
A large part of the committee’s reason for this event (if not the only reason) was, I think, to try and attract more members to enter prints each month by giving them an opportunity to make prints on whatever printer they might have or get them printed commercially at very low cost. Time will tell whether or not more folk will enter prints in future.
The guest who critiqued our postcards was very much suited to that task. Chris Holly has been a professional photographer and more in Canberra for many years. He has critiqued for our club many times over those years. But, most interestingly, he worked for some time in a government agency seeking to promote tourism to Canberra and that, of course, involved the use of images that would attract people to visit our capital city for a whole host of reasons. That meant Chris had some most interesting observations to make about why some of the entered prints of locations visited and things seen on holidays made good postcards.
Chris also had done considerable research into the history and purpose of postcards over the years and that too enabled him to make some most pertinent observations about our various prints. And, during the course of the evening, he also revealed some thoughts about postcards that he had as late as when he was on his way to the meeting. All “judges” should be as thorough in their preparation!
My own research since listening to Chris found an excerpt from a book by a Lydia Pyne titled Postcards – The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Social Network. It informed me that “Postcards have been printed, sold, mailed, and received on a scale that makes them, historically, the largest class of artifacts that humankind has ever exchanged. There are a lot of different ways to dig into the history of postcards and any history will inevitably be incomplete. Although postcards were a mass medium, they were – and still are – a disposable one. This disposability means that there are holes in the historical record, making a complete archive of all the world’s postcards inherently impossible.”
The University of Chicago Press website entry about Pyne’s book says “Postcards are usually associated with banal holiday pleasantries, but they are made possible by sophisticated industries and institutions, from printers to postal services. When they were invented, postcards established what is now taken for granted in modern times: the ability to send and receive messages around the world easily and inexpensively. Fundamentally they are about creating personal connections – links between people, places, and beliefs. Lydia Pyne examines postcards on a global scale, to understand them as artifacts that are at the intersection of history, science, technology, art, and culture. In doing so, she shows how postcards were the first global social network and also, here in the twenty-first century, how postcards are not yet extinct.”
After hearing another member comment that postcards generally have words on them identifying the place that they feature such as “Greetings from …..”, I decided to add words to my images. I spent some time carefully thinking about the font styles, sizes and colours I would use for the words. I also decide to print them without borders. More of my research reveals that, although many postcards have white borders, even modern ones, they are mostly those published between 1915 and 1930 approximately.
So, what postcards did I make and enter and what did Chris think of them? I guess I haven’t yet added them to “the largest class of artifacts that humankind has ever exchanged” – should I write messages on the reverse side and post them to people I know? (Chris kept saying he wanted to turn our entries over to read their messages.)
Greetings from Silverton was taken during the 2023 APS Meet-Up in and around Broken Hill. The message on the pile of tyres amused me and the modern wind turbines on the hills near to this not-so-modern dirt road attracted my attention as I headed for the heritage cemetery. I chose a font that sort of matched that on the tyres and used a red to match that on the sign at the left.
My Lyndonville postcard shows colourful things I saw in Vermont when I visited in the “Fall”. I chose a text colour to tone in with all the other colours in the image and what I thought was a somewhat old-fashioned font that I felt “fitted” the mood of the photo.
My Piha postcard shows Lion Rock (also known as Te Piha) – a stunning natural attraction and a sacred spiritual site for the Te Kawerau a Maki people who once lived in the area. It juts up from the Tasman Sea near the mouth of Piha Stream, separating the north and south sides of the “black sand” beach. The strong font I used for the word Piha matches the strong rock, whilst the delicate font for the other words might be seen as representing the tracery of the clouds or the grains of sand. The font colour was used to match the dark brooding colour of the rock as shown in the image. I’ve visited this lovely place a couple of times on trips to New Zealand.
And, finally, what scores did Chris Holly give to my three postcards. Along with most other entries he awarded each of them a 4 out of 5. A small number received scores of 3.5 and just two were given 4.5. But, in my view, the scores are not important. The range of interesting responses to the challenge and the critique commentaries on all the entries are the important things – as they always should be, so we learn.
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This article was first published on pages 18-21 of the April 2024 issue of The Printer here.