On White

The backgrounds of these postcards come in a couple varieties, which we'll have a look at in the next couple posts. There's the painted backdrop, held over from the nineteenth century; the actual outdoor scene; and the very particular yet popular "white background with an airbrushed spot of colour in one corner." While the other two may be dyed/toned or hand-tinted, these white-background ones are always of the hand-tinted variety. There's a lot of these from the 20s, but though the general genre lasted into the early 30s, this particular look seems to have faded in popularity by 1930.

Three of these postcards, by the way, come from the Willy and Aline collection.

(If you look closely, you'll see that the ends of the cigarettes have been given a tiny dot of red!)

The Photoshoot

While there seem to be very very few exact duplicate cards, slight variations from the same photoshoot were published all the time. Often all the cards from one shoot were given the same number from the publishing house, though sometimes they have sub-numbers (ie, 436/1, 436/2 etc.). Interestingly, I've found multiple examples where one person bought from two to four of the almost-same postcard to send to the same person. This set is one of these, sent every couple days from February 22 to March 13, 1932, from Andre to his "cherie." They're that beautiful kind of double-coloured image featured recently, shot outdoors, which seems to have been the more popular setting in the late 20s and early 30s. 

Postcards in Pink

Pink was quite a popular colour for dye-toned postcards-- and wow, are they pink!  As discussed in the post on dye-toning, the final image is made entirely out of dye, resulting in an image with pink darks and pink lights, until your eyes hurt from looking at it. 

The Double-Toned Postcard

Well I am back! I apologize very much for the disappearance of this blog, especially so early on. I realized I'd committed myself to more than I could manage, and unfortunately, this slipped. But I absolutely adore these postcards and I want to share them, and I'm going to dive back in! However, I'm going to go forward a bit differently, with less-detailed posts but maybe more postcards in each. Let's give it a try, anyway! 

First, though, I'll finish the survey of visual types. I'm actually not entirely sure how to classify these-- I'm not sure exactly how they're created, although it might be something to due with this double-toning process detailed by Kodak for film treatment. Somehow, though, they get this amazing blue-and-purple look--I've not yet seen it done with other colours, but maybe it's out there. 

Both these postcards are from the early 1930s (32 and 33), as are the others of this type I have (stay tuned!). It's too small a sample size to know for sure but it's possible it was a later innovation.