The Art Deco Frame

Postcards from the early 1930s with images set in wide, elaborate, tinted frames. Though  never common, these come in a wide variety of styles-- these are just a sample!

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Hand-Tinted Metallic (or, Stunners)

Hand-tinting is, of course, one of the main characteristics of this kind of card, and we've had a look at the lovely metallic texture introduced in the late 1920s. However, until recently, not even I knew they were ever combined. The results are simply gorgeous. 

(All are unwritten so I won't include the backs, this time)

(This is not a repeat of the one above-- if you look closely you'll see they are slightly different images from the same photoshoot)

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.

The Sepia-Toned Postcard

Though the majority of these postcards are brightly coloured, they did come in ordinary colours as well. Today, sepia: 

Sepia tones were popular in the 1920s generally. The sepia colour comes from sulfur-toning, a form of metallic toning. As well as tranforming blacks into deep brown, sulfur-toning renders the image much more stable than is possible with silver gelatin. 

Today we see sepia toning as adding a kind of "old-fashioned" look-- actually, people in the early twentieth century thought so too. Though the process is completely different, sepia tones somewhat resemble the tones of a faded albumen photograph of the 19th century:

carte-de-visite, probably 1860s-1870s, personal collection

... though no one would be mistaken. 

sulfur-toned print, 1920. personal collection

But back to the postcard! We've touched upon retouching-- this postcard is probably the most retouched out of any of mine. It isn't apparent at a distance, but up close the fine lines of retouching are everywhere. 

Eyes, eyebrows, smile lines, lips... even her skin has the speckled texture of dedicated retouching. 

The man, too, is heavily done:

His eyebrows and lips look almost drawn, with the lines of retouching on his cheek and nose contrasting with the softness of his untouched eyelashes. 

Nor are faces the only bit retouched:

You can see dark lines of retouching even around her fingers. 

At a normal distance, though-- do you notice? 

I absolutely love the back of this one:

It is marked Monday, 6 o'clock (no month or year). 

"Darling," it says, "Meet me at the garden tomorrow at 2 o'clock. A thousand kisses. I love you. Marcel."

With his handwriting... and especially his signature... I am swooning. 

Let's end with a close-up of that stunner of a signature. 

The Metallic Postcard

Today we meet an especially cool kind of postcard-- the metallic. This is not to be confused with metallic-toned (I know, it's confusing). Rather, these are printed on metallic paper, so they have the sheen of coloured foil. I've not yet come up with any way to represent this in a still format, but the wonderful Graphics  Atlas includes little video clips of surface gloss on prints-- go here, to their metallic postcard entry, and tab over to "unique surface gloss." Otherwise, imagine very shiny, somewhat textured wrapping paper. 

Here is the card:

Even like that you can see it has a somewhat different appearance from regular dye-toned postcards. We can zoom in and see:

It's almost pebbly. Graphics Atlas (with an even greater zoom) tells us that this appearance is due to "matting agent particulates" added to the emulsion. I'll admit to not knowing why these are added, whether it's necessary or just for appearance, but all the metallic postcards I've seen share this property. 

The colour is achieved through dye-toning, as we've discussed before. All the metallic postcards of this type I've seen have been pink or pink-red, although this might be sheer coincidence as I've only seen less than ten. I think they're extremely beautiful, much more than can be conveyed through images or even animations. You may perhaps have noticed, but the card in the banner is one of these. 

This particular card was sent as a New Year's card, and has a New Year's greeting attached to it. Close up you can really see I mean attached--it's almost like a 3-D sticker. I really do suspect that as holidays approached, sellers just took out a bunch of relevant holiday greetings and put them on whatever cards they had on hand....

The new year is question is 1933-- the card is dated December 30, 1932. Again I'll admit to a small sample size, but these metallic cards appear to have come later, not until the late 1920s and early 1930s. 

The message is to Dedi from Alphonse, wishing her a good year, good health, love, luck and happiness. 

The back also has this printed on it. All the metallic ones I have do as well, so I assume it's related to the paper or process, though at the moment that's all I know. Maybe a starting point for research, though!

We won't end with anything deep or interesting or weird today-- just this close-up because I think the couple is especially cute. 

The Tinted-Toned Postcard

We've looked at colourful hand-tinted postcards, and colourful toned postcards... but what about those times when one or the other just isn't enough? 

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There absolutely are postcards that combine the overall colour of a toned postcard with the detailed colour of tinting  for this vivid, almost surreal effect. Coupled with the pink, blue, or green skin tones, and the whole effect is gaudy and bizarre (and wonderful, in my eyes). 

Often these doubly coloured cards are toned then tinted, but this one is unusual. At first I assumed it had been dye-toned, but there's this:

You see that tarnish in the corner? That doesn't happen in a dye-toned print. So I thought, maybe it's metallic-toned, those can tarnish. Except to my knowledge there isn't anything you can metallic-tone a print with to make it this shade of pink-purple. 

Then, finally, I noticed that the Leo mark itself is pink. In a toned print, this doesn't happen-- the mark is an overlay, like a mask, resulting in no light reaching that area, resulting in a no-silver, non-image area. Without any silver whatever toning you do to it won't change the lack of colour. So if that part is pink--the pink is applied after printing. The postcard then presumably has a base of black-and-white print (probably under-exposed, so it isn't too dark), which colour has been added on top of (probably airbrushed). Then the additional tinting colour is added on that. Whew! Just when you think you know all the ways to make these... 

As we discussed, the tinting was done by use of stencil--this postcard especially demonstrates just how intricate those stencils could get. Even the tiny white dashes embellishing her dress and dots of her pearls are coloured by stencil, as you can see by the slight mis-register if you go very close. 

The dots and dashes are in perfect alignment with each other, but ever so slightly to the left of their spot on the photograph. 

You'll notice that the dashes aren't actually a pattern on her dress-- this is something we'll see again, the addition of a pattern by colouring. 

This card also has some very nice work done to simulate the effect of shading:

The darker orange looks applied freehand, with loose brushstrokes instead of crisp lines. Really nice, eh?

This card is also interesting in having a model look directly at the camera. The models in single-figure cards (which we haven't seen yet, but will) do this fairly often, but not those in couple cards. Out of the seventy or so I have as of writing this post, less than five have a model looking at the camera. 

The card was written June 11, 1927 (or possibly 1928--the number is a bit ambiguous). The writing gets tiny towards the end and if it's signed it's impossible to see the name, but he or she (I imagine it as a he, though I don't know why) is writing to a dear "brother and sister"-- I wonder if maybe one of them is an in-law, because it seems very strange to send a romantic couple card otherwise, doesn't it? The writer thanks them for a letter they've sent, saying he thought they'd forgotten him, and thanks them again. That's about where I quit trying to read it--the writing doesn't look so bad, until you try to read it. It's full of spelling mistakes and incorrect uses of apostrophes-- the word "lettre", meaning letter, is consistently spelled "l'ettre," while "m'oubliez" (forget me) is spelled "moubliez." The writer forms some of his letters really weirdly-- look at this word, for instance:

That is how he writes "pas." It took me a very long time to figure that out. He always writes p and s like that, which is tricky even when you know it. 

So I didn't get too far reading this--I hope to return eventually, ideally with the aid of a French-speaker, but for now it's a mystery to end on(though if anyone wants to take a crack at it, go ahead!)

The Metallic-Toned Postcard

Along with enjoying today's postcard, we'll continue our discussion of where these crazy colours come from.

Here is the postcard:

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Ah, you might think, if you paid attention to the last post and disregarded the title of this one--dye toning! I'll admit this is what I thought too, when I first discovered the existence of dye toning. However, there's a few things that stand out. 

First, there's the way this photograph looks quite a bit like a cyanotype. Cyanotypes, if you don't know, are a photographic process popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as throughout the 20th century in their use as blueprints (yes, those are a kind of photograph). Unlike most photographic processes they're based off of iron instead of silver, combined with ferrocyanide to make a lovely strong blue. 

cyanotype, ca. 1910, personal collection

However, there's quite a few ways in which you can tell right away the postcard isn't a cyanotype, but the resemblance in colour is quite strong, no?

Second, there's the fact that all of the postcards I have with this cyanotype blue exhibit a bit of metallic tarnish along the sides. 

No cards of a different colour exhibit this, nor do any of the non-toned ones. Silver gelatin photographs get tarnish ("silver mirroring"), but the dye toning process would prevent this from occurring. 

Finally, the colour can't be applied on top of the print, because, as we say last post with dye toning, the whites are white (or very close to). 

Then I came across this excellent discussion of metallic toning in motion picture film (see also yesterday's list of sources). Metallic toning is common in photography-- it's what's usually just called "toning." In the twentieth century it's mostly been sulfur (sepia) toning or selenium toning, occasionally gold toning with certain kinds of paper. But apparently you can also tone with ferric ferrocyanide... which is what you use to make cyanotypes. Unlike cyanotypes, however, which contain no silver, the final photograph would have a (coloured) silver ferrocyanide compound. Cyanotypes don't tarnish, but silver ferrocyanide? I'd be surprised if it didn't. I'm working on finding actual contemporary references to toning photographs with ferric ferrocyanide, but I'm pretty sure that's what these are.

If you're curious, the toning process is similar to sepia and dye toning, and goes like this: a first chemical bath converts the metallic silver image to a colourless compound (silver ferrocyanide), while a further, coloured material joins the compound in a second bath (in this cased, blue-coloured ferric ferrocyanide). Apparently this can also be done all in one bath as well. [Source]

I promise this blog won't be this technical much longer (I couldn't keep it up if I wanted to!)

We've touched upon retouching already; I find it very interesting so pointing it out in close-up is probably going to be a fairly regular feature of these posts. 

The blue disguises it a little but he's got quite a bit of retouching on his face, when you look closely. Even though he's not smiling, apparently his smile lines were still too marked and have been retouched away. You can see retouching under his eyes and quite a bit to the left of his nose... in fact I think they might have smoothed/straightened the line of his nose a bit, the highlight for the top two-third actually looks like it might have been applied or enhanced. (Retouchers totally, totally did this stuff. I know a terrific book from about 1905 dedicated entirely to the wonders of retouchng; I'll try and get a hold of it. It's public domain, so I could share some, for context.)

The card is dated July 28, 1924, and addressed to "ma chere petite Alice," from "Alphonse." I actually have a card from her to him as well, within a week of this one, but you're going to have to stay tuned for that one. He's writing from Lunéville (though it took me a few tries to decipher and identify that). 

We'll talk more about messages but one thing I have noticed--even in the 1920s, and despite often looking lovely, people's handwriting is messy and full of spelling and punctuation errors. Half the time writers omit periods and/or capital letters (this guy sort of capitalizes but no periods). Trying to read these you find very odd habits of letter formation-- have a look at the "p" in "petite Alice", for instance. These are of course totally personal, but still... I'd rather my boyfriend use the occasional mark of punctuation, wouldn't you?

Finally, this again:

The publishing house is Bleuet, which I have and have seen more of. Bleuet means "blueberry", which seemed to me a totally random name for a romance postcard publishing house. However, cereal box French failed me yet again. "Bleuet" also means cornflower, which I've always thought were rather unappreciated. In France, it's not-- in fact, the cornflower is the symbol for rememberance of the First World War and war generally, like the poppy is for Canadians and the rest of the Commonwealth. Until I find a Bleuet brand card relating to war, though, I'll assume it's not related to that. In terms of flower language, the cornflower represents delicate, sensitive, and pure feeling (source)-- I think this is what they were going for. A lot sweeter than "blueberry", eh? 

The Dye-Toned Postcard

Second in our journey is the dye-toned postcard.

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These toned postcards came in a variety of colours, with pink, green, and purple being the most common. The colours are very bright (especially the pink)-- if you feel they look a bit extreme on your computer screen, they're even more intense in real life. 

The processes used to create these coloured prints was dye toning. You may be familiar with other types of toning such as sulfur (sepia) toning, selenium toning, maybe even gold-toning if you're into nineteenth century photography. When a print is toned, the metallic silver particles that create the image are converted into  particles of a silver compound. In a sepia toned print, for example, the image particles are silver sulfide rather than just silver. Different compounds have different colours. 

With me? Maybe? (if this goes over your head, don't worry, it just barely skims mine.) All right, so, dye-toning operates on this sample principle, with an added twist. The toning process converts the metallic silver into silver ferrocyanide, which is colourless. However, these silver ferrocyanide particles react with dye. So when the print (looking completely blank at this point) is then immersed in a dye path, the concentrations of dye correspond to the densities of the silver ferrocyanide particles, which correspond to the shades of the image. 

Phew! If your eyes have glazed over, here's the gist of it: the photograph changes from a black and white print, where the image comes from silver particles, to a print where the image is made out of dye particles instead.

If we look closer:

You'll notice that the whites are still mostly white, but the "blacks" are pinkish purple. However, if instead you apply colour over a black and white print, as in this close-up of a postcard we haven't seen yet--

--the blacks are definitely black. 

[See the bottom of the post for sources and further reading]

But enough about process, let's look at the postcard itself. It is clearly staged, with no real attempt at evoking a natural look or chemistry between the people. In fact, they barely look aware of each other. You see this a lot, though pretend chemistry does seem to get more popular towards the late 20s and early 30s. These staged ones are very forumlaic, too. When I was doing a research presentation on these postcards, I had a slide each collaging just the faces of the women and the men... and I got laughs. The man is almost always in profile or 3/4 profile, with lowered eyes. The woman almost always has this vacant happy expression. I'll look at this further  later, so stay tuned for collages.

We've seen the close-up of the girl; here is the man.

You'll notice he is very obviously wearing lipstick. Sometimes eyeliner is quite apparent as well. It looks really, really weird now but I suppose we have to remember that the visual cues for these are film, and make-up for men was standard in 1920s cinema. Not all of the men in this cards have obvious make-up, but a lot do. (I just noticed his eyebrows have totally been done as well... I'll have to go check on how common that is and report back!).

As well as the poses, the models' facial types are standard. The women are pretty in a soft, young-looking way. The men have delicate, fine good looks (well, usually good looks, I'd debate the claim on some...) rather than strongly "masculine" features. These were totally the "in" types of the 1920s-- just look at Clara Bow and Rudolph Valentino.

As well as being a romance card, this one double as a holiday greeting:

"Joyeuses Paques" is Happy Easter.

Unlike yesterday's card, I think this one may have been shot specifically with the holiday theme. I don't know exactly what she's holding, but I suspect it may be a traditional Easter thing.

Like the image, the message combines holiday greeting and romance.

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The card is addressed to "Mon Petit", although I can't make out what the name is (anyone?). "Mon/ma petit/petite" is a common French term of endearment and you see it all over these cards.

My French is weak, so for now I'll paraphrase: She expresses her good wishes for Easter and sends "the best and tenderest kisses from your little Suzanne who loves you forever with all her heart."

The card is dated Paris, March 30, 1929.

You'll notice that not only is the card not stamped or addressed, the writer hasn't even attempted to leave a space for the address. Probably 95% of the ones in my collection are like this. The messages imply they were mailed rather than given to someone, but there's no mark of it. I've concluded that they were mostly mailed, but in envelopes, like greeting cards. On a few I can make out the impression of a postmark to verify this. I think there's two reasons. First is that, well, most of them are love letters, and maybe people didn't want the world reading that. Second--and I think maybe more importantly, considering you see this trend even with non-romantic messages--in France at the time stamps had to go on the image side of postcards. I suspect people mostly didn't want to ruin the cards.

There's a few more toning processes to come and lots of great postcards, stick around!

---

Dye Toning Sources

Dye toning and its sister, metallic toning (see the next post) were actually used mostly to colour film. Surprising as it seems, toned and tinted films were quite popular in the 1920s, with colours just as crazy and bright as you see in these postcards (sadly they haven't lasted as well). The use of this kind of toning in photographs is quite striking and hasn't yet been discussed, but the film angle is helpful and fascinating. These recources all have great images, I reccomend a look!

"Mordant toning/dye toning," Timeline of Historical Film Colours. http://zauberklang.ch/filmcolors/timeline-entry/1217/

Eastman Kodak, Tinting and Toning of Eastman Positive Motion Picture Film, 1927 edition, available online at: http://www.brianpritchard.com/tinting_and_toning_of_eastman_po_4ed.htm

Read, Paul (2009): ‘Unnatural Colours’. An introduction to colouring techniques in silent era movies. In: Film History, 21.1., pp. 9-46. Available online (if you are able to access Project Muse): http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/fih/summary/v021/21.1.read.html