I was an exchange student to France in 1981.
My host family’s grandparents gave all of their “vintage” postcards sent to them by friends and relatives on holiday in France in the 60’s and 70’s.
This piece uses those cards.
While the cards themselves were beautiful, in that aged coloured photo way, they were not great together.
And i didn’t want to use just one side, since the banal greetings (kisses from our holiday! wish you were here!) were priceless – saying so much and yet so little. And the stamps are cool.
In the end I printed the backs of the cards (with the greetings) over one another on the coloured printer, giving a gorgeous complex pattern. It gave me control over the paper stock, and allowed a uniformity of colour.
The inner pages of places I turned into a flag book, and to create a sense of more uniform colour I added a tissue paper layer. The final book is here.
A few years later i played with the images in photoshop for laser cutting, this is the cards photoshopped into pieces and with the contrast boosted.
