Fantasy Travel: Vintage People on Photo Postcards

(Hardback)

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Description

This series celebrates the Bodleian Librarys acquisition of Tom Phillipss archive of over 50,000 photographic postcards dating from the first half of the twentieth century, a period in which, thanks to the ever cheaper medium of photography, ordinary people could afford to own their portraits. Each title in this series is thematically assembled and designed by the artist, the covers featuring a linked painting specially created for each title from Tom Phillipss signature work, A Humument.

Fantasy Travel shows people sitting proudly and playfully in studio mock-ups of aeroplanes, cars, speedboats and hot air balloons. Such modes of transport were beyond the dreams of the average person in the early twentieth century but the photographic studios allowed them to indulge wild flights of fancy and take away the resulting postcards.

Reviews

"Picture postcards from a century ago capture unique moments in time and place and are a wonderful social history record. Tom Phillips is adept at seeking out and choosing amazingly evocative postcard images."--Brian Lund, editor of Picture Postcard Monthly
"These images are captivating visual vignettes. We may not know who the subjects are, but the postcards offer us a glimpse of their interests, their time, and their world. Tom Phillips's exceptional collection gives us a fascinating chance to retrieve something of these lives."--Sandy Nairne, director, National Portrait Gallery, London

Author Bio

Tom Phillips is a major British artist who lives and works in London.