The Hand-Tinted Postcard

I thought we'd start this carousel of 1920s French romantic fantasy postcards (which need a snappier moniker) with a spin through the main types you see, stopping to peek at some of the traits we'll follow up on later. Shall we?

Each of these postcards is marked with its publishing house and an identification number, which is unique to the particular photo/negative (most of the time, that is, but we'll get to that). We'll discuss publishing houses more later, but for now, just a note that we'll be referring to individual cards by these identifiers. 

So, Carmen 184:

personal collection

personal collection

This card unfortunately has no date, but is probably mid-1920s, judging by the style (there appear to be some changes as the decade progresses). Many of these were not in fact mailed as postcards (envelopes seem to have been favoured) but as there is a full address, and perhaps a faint rectangular mark on the front (French postcards at the time took stamps on the front), it seems to have been put in the post as is. The card was sent from one woman, Louise, to another, Julie, for St. Catherine's Day. I'll discuss this more further, but St. Catherine is the patron saint of unmarried women, and it was traditional in France for unmarried women to send each other cards on the saint's day. As the implication of this tradition is, essentially, "best of luck in not being unmarried this time next year,", romantic cards with couples were often used for this purpose, and we'll see more. 

In fact, the card producers and/or sellers seem to have catered to this-- you'll notice the St. Catherine lettering in gold on the front. In this postcard it's clear this was not part of the original design, as it overlaps the publisher's mark.

I suspect that when St. Catherine's Day (November 25) approached, sellers/producers stamped a bunch of the cards they already had. ("Stamped" isn't literal; I'm actually not sure yet how this lettering is applied, but it's glittery and 3-D). 

This card is a great example of the "hand-tinted" type. The photograph itself is a sepia-toned silver gelatin print  probably printed a bit lighter than you'd want for a straight print. The colour has been applied directly to the print, following a tradition going back to the start of photography. However, unlike most nineteenth-century tinted prints, these were mass-produced for consumers, and the colouring method was adapted accordingly. 

Colouring was done with stencils. A stencil would be cut for each colour desired. The colorists--almost all women-- would each be responsible for one colour. The woman would get the print, put her stencil over it, paint over it with her colour of dye, and pass it on to the next colourist. As you can see, these stencils could be very intricate. When lined up perfectly, you'd never guess they were stencilled.

It's really only when they don't line up that the stenciling becomes apparent. The colours don't just fall out of the lines, like a kid with a colouring book, they slip away in the exact shape they're supposed to match. 

This postcard has some of the most perfect stencil line-up I've seen; this tiny slip barely registers. I've others where it's immediately noticeable.

Lips are one place where a perfect line-up is perhaps impossible, though again, they vary significantly in degree. 

This close-up also illustrates one more prominent feature: retouching. If you aren't aware, retouching of faces hardly started with Photoshop; it's been the standard for commercial portraits since the beginning. Retouchers worked on the negatives with pencils and other things to fill in lines, wrinkles, acne, and so on. It's a great topic that I can't get into right now. Often you don't see it unless you're looking, and especially if you zoom in to the degree we are here. You can see the lines of retouching very clearly at this magnification--very extensive retouching. In fact, the perfectly natural smile lines of her face have been smoothed almost away. This is something you see on all these cards. The soft look is done to an extreme. 

Almost everything I've mentioned here is going to be explored further--when it does, I'll add in cross-reference links and so on, but for now, stay tuned!

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Bonus: This particular postcard has one weird thing:

What on earth is that?? It's a leaf or grain or something. It crosses the woman's neck and dress and clearly isn't a part of either. The only thing I can think of is that it's a bit of plant that got stuck to the negative before printing or photographic paper before exposure. I'm not sure how that would happen (I suppose if it was contact-printed outside, maybe?), but more than that, why it either wasn't noticed or cared about. Did no one see it? Did the printer really not want to make one more print? It isn't at all noticeable-- I spent a ton of time looking at this card until I saw it, and only highly magnified--though once you see it, you can't unsee it. Craziness.