Customer Reviews

Icons Bizarro Postcards (Icons Series)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was expecting great things from this colourful paperback, the title suggests that it would be in the same style as the three volume `Boring Postcards' (UK, USA and Germany) by British photographer Martin Parr, each page has a life-size postcard, including the white border with caption, or sometimes the card would have a deckle edge. Very few of these cards are boring of course, as they tend to show things from the recent past. They can also be valuable, have a look at any postcard seller's website and you'll see `boring' cards of fifties motels selling for some dollars. So that card you have been using all these years as a bookmark and showing Hank's Garage and Lube Shop in downtown Pigs Knuckle, Arkansas could be worth something.

Unfortunately `Bizarro Postcards' does not deliver because there is no indication that they are postcards. All the photos are either whole page or two butted together and they all bleed of the edge of the page, the book is really just a collection of photos that could just as easily be cut out of magazines. Clearly though, some are obviously postcards, the motel ones that have small inset photos of the bedrooms, the views of shops or restaurants or laundrettes. They should all have had some indication of where they come from and what the photos mean.

Apart from the three `Boring Postcards' check out the 2000 in `The Postcard Century' by Tom Phillips, plenty of weird cards and some funny captions too.

Sorry Jim and Taschen but I think 'Bizarro Postcards' is a dismal failure and a step back from your usual high editorial standards.

Don't judge this book by its cover - it's much better than that - a kaleidoscopic collection of fragments of the American Dream from those innocent days before we left footprints on the Moon - and all rendered in eye-poppingly amped-up colours - give your brain a treat and savour this volume.

The previous reviewer was off the mark. This book is jam packed with fun mid-century images from a living room set-up above a freeway, to some strange Fred-Flintstone-Land pictures with a really creepy costumed Fred and Barney.

Yes, it would of been nice to have brief descriptions or captions for each page( there is no text through-out), but I believe it was the author's intention not to explain everything. It makes these images all the more bizarre when taken out of context and you just see them for what they are (hence, the title of Bizarro Postcards). It almost feels as if you're looking at pictures that were taken in the Twilight Zone. It's extremely entertaining and alot of fun.

I am an enormous fan of the Taschen books and this title is just as much fun their previous offerings.

There's a lot of easy humor in the modernism of the 1950s and 1960s. Dated fashions, bad science extrapolations, and postcards commemorating the quite banal as well as the uniquely strange. The Taschen Icons books are thin, inexpensive explorations of art and culture (broadly interpreted) and can be hit or miss. This one is decent, but not stunning. Too many motels and not enough BIZARRO!