About boring postcards

I have been collecting boring postcards since 1996 and so far I have over 450 cards on this theme. They are mostly Swedish but a few are from other countries. Lately I've tried to focus only on Swedish postcards to limit the collection.

The order in which the postcards are shown (unless you do a search or sort them alphabetically) is the order in which they were aquired by me. That means the latest cards are on the last pages.

Boring?
I will try to define what I think a boring postcard should look like.

A boring postcard should fulfill one or more of the following:
  • be supposed to be used by tourists, locals etc i.e. NOT as advertisment sent out by a company or business.
  • show a disproportionate amount of concrete, road, abandoned parking lots, uninteresting fountains or statues, or multi-storey residential or office buildings made by concrete or brick.
  • depict something seemingly pointless or just plain ordinary.
  • have a total lack of life in the picture.
  • be photographed from a strange angle.
  • not focus on anything particular in the picture.
  • have most of the actual motif obscured by something.


Books I recommend!


Boring Postcards by Martin Parr
This is the first book in the Boring Postcard-series. All of the 160 postcards are from the British Isles. Civic centres, motorways, airports and power stations are some of the things depicted. This one is great!


Boring Postcards USA by Martin Parr
This is the second book and this one is filled with another 160 boring postcards but this time they are from the USA.

The Postcard Century by Tom Phillips
The Postcard Century is hundreds of pages with postcards divided into every year from 1900 to 2000.

 

 

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This page was last edited 2002-09-28 16:24