This is a website to support a photographic project that uses found postcards brought together as a collection in order to alter and question our perception of a familiar location, in this instance Southampton. It could be said that the postcard is the least elitist form of artefact due to its history as an extensively used form of communication that didn’t require a high level of literacy or social formalities. The postcard is a material object with its own rituals of sending and receipt. They are an example of phatic communication – a message with no inherent content, sent for its own sake to make aware of one’s existence to another.
They have defined life rather than mirrored it by depicting the vernacular aesthetic of a period. It is a medium in which the world documents itself in terms of the way it wishes to be seen. The photographic (postcard) image has an impact on the construction of historical memory. The main function of a postcard has always been to celebrate the new. What seems quaint now was at its production the latest thing. Nostalgia is an enemy of the postcard, not a virtue. When looking at a postcard one “must perform the continuous feat of seeing this urgent newness in the older pictures whilst imagining the future quaintness of present scenes. In this balancing act is the rich experience of a perpetual present and an eternal time gone by, in the same instant new and old.”