A collection of postcards 30 postcards | summer 2013
Produced by Georgia Stubbs
All photographs taken by Georgia Stubbs over the course of three weeks whilst travelling in the United States of America in the Summer of 2013.
A collection of postcards 30 postcards | summer 2013
Produced by Georgia Stubbs
the postcard The first postcard I collected was from my first stop, Hollywood. I was drawn to this because to me it sums up how Hollywood is everytime I visit. Beautiful sunsetS, beautiful skylines, and of course, the famous Hollywood sign.
the postcard Disneys California Adventure will always have a special place in my heart. I have many memories here, from birthdays to family vacations. I fell in love with baseball here. My favourite part is the cars land, an extremely real version of the film. You feel like you’re in aother world. When I saw this cars postcard I just coudln’t resist it.
the postcard Universal Studios, Hollywood, is like a real life movie set, so I wanted a postcard that summed the park up. I chose this one because it has some of my favourite movies on and incuded the Universal Studios ball that always reminds me of the place everytime I see it.
the postcard I am still devistated over the Jaws ride being removed, so when I saw this it brought me back to the good old days. If I can’t ride the ride, I will just have to buy the postcard. A classic film and this certainly made me a little nostalgic for the ride.
the postcard Palm Springs is one of my favourite places in the world, and the postcard sums up why. Palm trees, golf courses, mountains, sunshine, and beautiful scenery. I will retire here one day. (I hope.)
the postcard I found this postcard in Palm Springs, as Frank Sinatra once lived there. As a fan of his music I had to buy.
the postcard Drove through Death Valley on our route from Palm Springs to Las Vegas.
the postcard If you enjoy outstanding rock formations and lots of Joshua trees, this is the place to visit. The postcard shows just a snippet of what the National Park is like.
Uncovering the history behind collecting by Diane Fricke
People have been collecting for centuries. These collections range from rare baseball cards worth thousands of dollars to the exotic gems that glisten in display cases, showing their wealth.
memories,” Shoptaugh writes. “But even if memory cannot be relied upon to faithfully reproduce a record of the past, it remains vital to our understanding of the past.”
that are weird or unusual to show individualism. Another reason is for the collector’s need to be complete. Akin said she has seen people cry out in relief once their collection is complete.
However, more collections are comprised of oddities that have little value beyond the sentiment for the collector. Even with a collection of high dollar value, it isn’t often that a collector sells the collection to claim the money. Why, then, would someone put so much time and effort into amassing a collection?
This may explain why people collect old war memorabilia in an effort to remember the romantic aspects of war while not forgetting the true horror of such times.
While Akin says many know the value of their collection to the penny, but never sell a thing, she believes some people collect for money and profit.
Terry Shoptaugh, University archirist and instructor at Minnesota State University Moorhead, can shine some light on why people collect. In his article, “Why Do We Like Old Things? Some Ruminations on History and Memory,” Shoptaugh offers the idea that collecting is based on a need to inspire recoluction. People collect in an effort to remember and relive the past. “We use keepsakes to stimulate memory, especially to trigger fond
As an anthropologist from the University of California, Marjorie Akin is an expert on the subject of why people collect. Her essay, “Passionate Possession: The Formation of Private Collections,” shares Shoptaugh’s idea that people collect for a connection to the past and memories. “Objects can connect the collector to the historic, valued past,” Akin writes. Stetond the past, Akin also includes four other reasons why people collect. The first is to satisfy a sense of personal aesthetics. Some collect to please personal tastes. Others collect items
Kim A. Herzinger, an English professor, award-winning author and avid collector, provides yet another twist on obsession with collecting. “Collecting is a means by which one relieves a basic sense of incompletion brought on by unfulfilled childhood needs,” Herzinger said. “It functions as a form of wish fulfillment, which eases deep-rooted uncertainties and existential dread.” Psychologist Werner Muensterberger shares Herzinger’s idea. In his book titled “Collecting: An Unruly
Passion: Psychological Perspectives,” Muensterberger says that control of the object collected brings “relief of the child’s anxiety and frustration that comes with feeling helpless and being alone.” While collecting stems from incompletion of the past, Herzinger adds that it’s also a passion. “Collecting, like most passions, has the capacity to let (the collector) live in another world for a while. If I could tell you why passion allows us to inhabit another world, I would stop collecting.” Herzinger says the collector is engaged in a kind of worship. “(The collector) is experiencing the kind of sensory transcendence that we most closely associate with religion or love. And, like religion or love, his collection is a kind of security against uncertainty and loss.” The sense of completion is one of the main drives collectors. Experience however, Herzinger continues to
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explain that it’s important for collectors to maintain a sense of control over their own collection. To collect every baseball card would be impossible, leaving the collector with a feeling of always being overwhelmed. To cure this, the collector narrows the field from baseball cards to, let’s say, the New York Yankees cards. As the collection becomes more advanced, so does the procedure for collecting more cards. The collection goes from New York Yankees to Roger Maris. In this way, the collector can maintain the balance of control and completion. Herzinger also warns that while the collection brings much love and joy to the collector, there will always be disappointment. “I once had a very good friend, a record collector, who was showing me around his jazz collection. At some point, after itemizing some of the choicest items, he fell into a kind of silent ache, apparently disappointed
We use keepsakes to stimulate memory, especially to trigger fond.
with my response, or lack of it.” Many people feel they have a special bond with their collection and can’t help but feel frustrated that no one seems to appreciate it as much as they do. However, if the thought of collecting due to nostalgia and need for control seem impossible to agree with, Kurt Kuersteiner offers one more reason. In his article, “Collecting Collections,” Kuersteiner says, “I believe the main reason people collect something is a basic interest in the topic.” Can it really be that simple? The debate over the reasons people collect continues to go on, but the one truth that cannot be denied is that people will always continue to collect, whatever the reason.
the postcard I visited Las Vegas on one of it’s busiest weekends of the year, Labour Day weekend. I’ve visited there on various times of the year, and it’s actually not as hectic as you’d think, but Labour Day weekend lived up to all it’s stereotypes and it was actuallly great. I wanted a postcard that represented the Vegas lifestyle and I thought this one did perfectly. Lights, luxury and money.
the postcard It’s almost impossible to visit Las Vegas and not see an Elvis Presley impersinator. I think the first thing people think of when they think of Elvis is Las Vegas. I’m a fan of his and loved this vintaged style postcard.
the postcard I visited Lake Mead whilst in Las Vegas. It’s amazing how much wildlife you see near here, and when you’re in the ‘Vegas bubble’, you almost forget you are in the middle of a desert. I thought this postcard represented the beauitful lake well.
the postcard I had to buy another Lake Mead postcard, as after a day on the lake the sun was starting to set, causing amazing red skies. Unfortunetly my camera battery died on me, so thank god for this beauiful postcard that takes me back to that phenonimal sunset.
the postcard I saw this postcard when visiting Hoover Dam and just loved the composition of the photograph.
the postcard My reasoning for butying the second postcard on Hoover Dam was that this image truly shows the scale of the Dam. To think people hand built this is mind blowing.
the postcard I loved this traditional style postcard and it was suprisingly the first ‘greetings from’ postcard i’d seen on my trip. This is one of my favourite designs and I especially love how it shows all the different things in Arizona.
the postcard After travelling on Route 66 for many hours by now, I had passed by many towns and cultures. I stopped over in a small Native American town and I have never been anywhere quite like it. (No alcohol was served anywhere and it was illegal to buy or drink there.) I saw this postcard and had to buy as I was interested in learing their symbols of their culture. This is one of the most educational, interesting postcards I own and by owning this I feel like I have brought a little bit of their culture home with me.
the postcard I actually got given this by the hotel I was staying in for the night. I nice little sentiment and reminder of the place.
the postcard The coolest little town I have ever visited. Williams, Arizona is a real life version of Radiator Springs. I felt like I had gone back in time. Old school diners, classic cars, handcraft shops... it was magical. A true Route 66 town. The postcard is from a diner we ate at.
The Entangled Object By Bjarne Rogan
The aesthetics of the card.
As a cheap pictorial item in a world where other colored pictures were still rare and expensive, the motif in itself was of high importance. The pictures gave visual pleasures, information about distant places and famous persons, opportunities for longing and dreaming, and pretexts for discussions in the family and conversations at social gatherings, as for example in the very common habit of keeping postcard albums for guests to look at. Postcard albums were the “coffeetable books” of the turn of the century (Rogan 1999) and the cards, with their colorful visual representation of the world, symbolized modernity at large.
The card as a souvenir. The
enormous number of all sorts of cards secured for posterity in chests and drawers, in recesses and attics, tells its own tale about the drive to uphold the memory of persons, places, and events. All the congratulations cards, but even
more the large quantities of cards with local and tourist motifs, testify to their value as souvenirs—souvenirs of persons, of places where someone lived, of sites visited, or of travels undertaken.
The card as a collectible. A
new collecting vogue, that of picture postcards, swept over the Western world around 1900. In the first years, collecting postcards was primarily the hobby of young girls and women. There were even collector clubs for ladies only. From around 1905 the men entered the scene and took over the clubs and the journals, which proliferated during the Golden Age. 4 Close reading of advertisements in British postcard journals confirms that in 1900 the great majority of collectors were women. A similar reading in 1906 shows that men had taken over, outnumbering the women by about five to one. Women collected motifs like views, landscapes, portraits, and works of art, but men started when
more modern motifs appeared, like humorous cards, actresses and “posed beauties,” ships, locomotives, and other tourist and transport topics. Serious postcard collecting claimed aesthetic ideals rather than serial or taxonomic and scientific ones.
The card as a means of communication. The driving force
behind the postcard, from a postal history point of view, was the need for a practical, cheap, and quick medium for sending short, simple messages. Writing letters was for the élite, not for ordinary people, and for women more than for men. The telegraph, introduced in the 1860s, was until around World War I an expensive way of communicating, mostly used for business purposes. The resistance to open messages that anyone could read was strong—not least in the upper class, letter-writing milieus, but also from postal authorities.
the postcard From where I was standing, I could see the Colorado River that beautifuly formed the Grand Canyon, but unfortunetely my camera lens didn’t reach it well, so when I saw this postcard I had too buy it to remember how overwhelming it was.
the postcard I just loved the photo on this postcard of mules carrying sightseers down the Grand Canyon Bright Angle Trial. I like how it shows the vastness of the Grand Canyon, too.
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the postcard I loved the design of this postcard, and it’s almost rustic colour scheme. You can drive for miles and miles on this route and not see a single thing, and when you do, it’s exactly whats on this postcard - old abandened classic cars, motels, and vintage gas stations with years upon years of history.
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the postcard This postcard reminding me of another item I like to collect, American number plates so buying this was a no brainer for me, simply because I love American cars and have an interest in their plates.
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the postcard Get you kicks on route 66! Nobody can say Route 66 without having a little sing song in their heads of this classic. I couldn’t bring myself to stop buying Route 66 postcards because each one summed up my journey in their own way.
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the postcard The postcard sums up the dream of road tripping across America in a classic convertable car. I was especially drawn to the family in the car, all wearing different coloured pastal shirts. Such lovely photography. It also remined me of all the classic cars i’d seen whilst driving on Route 66.
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the postcard This postcard is one of my favourites as it shows part of the route we travelled on. I love how it shows you the route and all the tourist attractions you will see on the way.
the postcard It was my first time visiting Colarado and it sure didn’t dissapoint. I now understand why they call it colourful Colorado. I found this postcard in a little design shop, and it’s one of my favourites. The typography is a change from the usual postcard type, and it’s refreshing to have something that’s not so ‘in your face.’
the postcard Whilst in Colorado I stopped in Breckenridge. The town is one of the most beautiful towns i’ve stopped in, and the postcard reminded me of how pretty the town looked from our balcony. Simply stunning. It also reminded me of Christmas a little, and I would love nothing more than to visit this place at Christmas. I think if I look back at this in a few years, I will need to go back.
the postcard One thing that stood out to me in Lake Dillion was all the sail boats out on the lake. I bought this postcard as a reminder to how beautiful it truly is.
the postcard A city sky line with light movement created by a slow shutter screen may be cliche, but I just loved this postcard. The city is only small and it shows in this photo.
the postcard On my last day of the trip I visited Denver Zoo. I was drawn the ‘pop art’ style of design and thought the postcard itself was just asthetically pleasing. I also liked how the logo was placed in the middle and overall thought the design was good.