Postcards from the Anthropocene - DPR Barcelona
2022
These images taken from postcards, in which the focal point of the image has been distorted, were made to accompany my essay – Journeying towrds the Antropocene through the paper landscapes of the Modern – in Postcards from the Anthropocene. Unsettling the Geopolitics of Representation (DPR Barcelona, Editors: Benek Cincik, Tiago Torres-Campos) in which I discuss postcards as evidencing the reification of Nature in the age of Oil.
“Like geologists eltiologists (or postcard aficionados) divide time, albeit the truncated span of a mere century and a half, into different periods – linen, white border, divided back, etc. The postcards with which I have been working belong to the late Modern Photochrome era. Chromes or Moderns are glossy, photo-offset, images saturated with colour; chosen by me for their origins in the mid 1950s to 1970’s, a period of economic growth fuelled by oil, which saw an accompanying expansion in popular travel and consumerism. Despite their déclassé status David Proskha and Jordana Mendelson note the capacity of postcards to productively support investigation of class, gender and power. I have sought to extend these considerations to environmental relations using the cards themselves as means to audit contemporary geological imaginaries”.