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.

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.