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| The finished Parthenon photo |
Check out more of my Linen Postcard work at flickr
Recently I was editing some photos I had taken on my trip to Nashville. I came across a photo I took of the Parthenon. For those that don’t know, Nashville built a life size replica of the temple that sits in Athens, Greece in 1897 as part of the Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition. I thought the photo looked rather drab; the grass in the foreground was brown and the sky was overcast. I did like the framing however of the mostly grass and sky with this sliver of a building in the middle. Usually when editing photos of my trips, I don’t do anything more than color correct, adjusting the contrast here and bringing out more detail in the shadows there, those sorts of things. Unless I'm looking for some sort of mood whereupon I’ll add a filter or preset but that’s a whole different situation. With the Parthenon photo I adjusted a lot of the parameters to get that grass green and the sky blue. After experimenting for a bit however it looked less like a photo and more like an illustration. What it reminded me of was the linen postcards that were very popular between the 1930’s and 1950’s.
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| The unedited Parthenon photo that inspired the Linen Postcard project. |
Simply put, Linen postcards came about because of a new type of ink that was introduced that produced more vivid and brilliant hues. However, using the cardstocks available at the time, the final result was pretty dull. New card stocks were eventually developed that had a lot more cotton fiber in them resulting in the stock being embossed and having the look of a linen texture. Now they were able to hold those vivid hues. In Addition to the rich, saturated colors associated with linen postcards, other characteristics are their soft focus and white borders. Some of these postcards are from photographs that were commissioned by printing companies and turned them into these highly saturated vistas. Over the years I had purchased a few of these postcards at vintage shops and flea markets, without knowing they were called linen postcards. I loved the look and feel of them. I thought them to be quite remarkable. It also seemed that there was a linen postcard of every vista, building, park, monument of every city and town in America no matter how obscure.
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| The unedited Ferry Building photo. I spent too much time on this one. |
After working on the Nashville Parthenon photo I went back through my photo database, sometimes going back as far as 18 years, to pick out photos that might look good with my “Linen Postcard” treatment. I made it into a project for the last month. Like my other photoshop projects, I found it very pleasurable to work. I couldn’t just copy and paste effects either because the lighting, colors and exposure is different in each photo. What worked in one photo didn’t necessarily work in another. So I just would experiment, using a variety of tools and tricks. I tried to get rid of anything that wouldn’t normally be in a postcard such as people, cars, trucks etc. With the Ferry Building in San Francisco, I probably spent way too much time getting rid of people, cars, traffic cones and walk/don’t walk signs. In some photos, I would replace the skies with a gradient of blues, pinks and oranges. Traditionally, the postcard’s perspective is usually going to be from a bird’s eye view. Most of mine are taken from the ground looking up. And the most important thing in working on these linen postcards was to find a linen texture to complete the look.
Check out more of my Linen Postcard work at flickr
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| Photo of plane from Bob Garrard Collection |
This style of postcard was not limited to Linen Postcards. I just wanted to create one.
These "Greetings from" post cards with big block letters with different scenes inside them were some of the most popular postcards of the day. Nowadays you can see this style in murals in different cities across the USA.
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All photos © Paul O'Connell(except where stated)
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