Saturday, 27 June 2015

Postcard imperfect


Above are scans of some of the postcards i've been buying from ebay. 
All of them show a scene linked to deforestation and land clearance.
(clockwise from top left)
1 - Coffee sacks being loaded onto a cargo ship in Brazil
2 - Felled trees for timber in Arizona
3 - A log jam caused by low water levels in the dam in 'Sawdust City' (Eau Claire), Wisconsin. The trees were felled upstream and floated down via a manmade flume that was caused by water pressure and gravity from the dam.]
4 - Water Street Bridge, 'Sawdust City' - the main bridge road that improved exportation of commercial products


Postcards are a way of inserting oneself into a narrative, in one of two ways:
1 - as the person who writes the postcard, you are the one 'away'; who is exerting some sort of ownership of an experience space by telling others about it.
2 - as receiver, who hears of that related experience and can imagine it form afar.
Either way; you are both in a situation that tells of a removal from the evryday and normal happenings. You are tapping into a demand for what is not yours: this in some sense is an exploitation of another place or culture (that doesn't mean bad exploitation by the way):
The postcard can be a vehicle for expressing a want for something that is not yours; it is a demand.

Demand in the commercial and manufacturing world often leads to exploitation, of either people, animals of land.

(I've thought about postcards often before, and what they signify; the photographing of their subject, the writing of them, and the receiving of them. This is an old post I made about postcards: http://battle-sponge.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/postcard-perfect.html

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And below are all the main products in my studio that are produced abroad in areas that are heavily deforested to do so.... :(



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