The Postcard Aesthetic

After scanning, captioning, key-wording and retouching numerous vintage postcards from the 1900s through the 1960s for my new stock image archive, I'm beginning to see real life as a series of postcard views.

I mean that the postcard aesthetic has infiltrated my photography -- at least for now -- and I like it. Here's a recent example of my postcard-influenced photography:



There was a layer of unreality, of fantasy, to the classic postcards of yesteryear.

During the golden age of American postcards -- roughly from 1930 to 1950 -- picture postcards were generally made from black-and-white photos that were heavily retouched and colorized, often by a staff artist for the big postcard companies who had never actually seen the subject of the photograph in person.

So the airbrush artist pretty much guessed at the colors -- and modified them up as he saw fit, as he imagined them.

In some cases, when, for instance, a hotel commissioned a postcard company to create a card for the hotel, the postcard company would ask the client to write on a translucent sheet overlaid atop a black-and-white proof what the various colors should be -- so the staff artist could paint, or airbrush, in the approximate colors, in a sort of paint-by-numbers fashion, using the color descriptions written by the client on this overlay as his map.

All this resulted in a fantasy universe of imaginatively colored and airbrushed postcards featuring beautiful colors laid over the black-and-white photo which then became a nearly invisible base underneath all the paint.


For instance this Cuban postcard published in 1945 of gorgeous Cuban landscape seems to show a deliciously darkening sky over a vibrant layer of orange glow from the below-the-horizon sun. But I've seen three other postcard versions of this exact same photo in cards published in the early 1900s, in which it's clearly daylight and the totally blue daytime sky had big fluffy clouds, but they appear to have been painted out in this version.

Some postcards for Miami Beach hotels were notorious for airbrushing out all the crowded surroundings -- so there were no competing hotels next door in the picture. Some of these cards also moved the hotels closer to the beach, eliminating for example, a street that separated them. Sure, that's amusing to see, but also pretty dishonest and I suppose it offends my sensibilities as a former hardcore journalist for newspapers and magazines.

But in my current role as an advertising and fine art photographer, I like some other liberties that the airbrush artists took. I like their slightly muted, yet luminous color palette -- probably enhanced by the fact that the postcards' paper has over the decades now oxidized and slightly yellowed, giving a gently reddish-brownish-yellow undertint to the proceedings. I like what some anonymous artist did with that Cuban landscape photo.

I found technical means of creating similar looks with modern cameras and image-processing software.

The soft old colors of those vintage cards - and the inevitable, if often artifical, red-orange-yellow sunsets glowing low on the horizon, sometimes lighting up the underside of big fluffy clouds -- has made me want to do similar retouching in Photoshop.

Here, for instance, are images of Miami Beach palm trees I shot with my new G9 camera -- before and after I gave it the postcard look:





The G9 is brilliant, small (4 x 2 x 1-inch) camera from Canon with a 12-megapixel sensor and a fine lens, plus image stabilization and a host of other features, including the ability to shoot richly detailed and highly malleable RAW files.

I carry it with me everywhere (unless I'm carrying one of my big, heavyweight cameras). It fits into a cargo pocket or a little waist pouch

Anyhow, I added the lilac and yellow colors to the sky of these G9 palm tree images -- and it looked to me like a 21st century hommage to the postcard artists of an earlier day.

You can see more of my images -- some with a soft, and some with a bright, color palette -- on my new e-commerce-enabled, stock photo site at digitalrailroad.net/billwisser