- Jubilee offer: spend £10 or more on any product sold by Amazon.co.uk on or before June 6 and you can buy The Diamond Jubilee A Classical Celebration Album for just £2.50 Here's how (terms and conditions apply)
 Trade In this Item for up to £2.35
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Langweilige Postkarten: Boring Postcards Germany for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £2.35, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Special Offers and Product Promotions
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Boredom amounts to the same in any culture, but English photographer Martin Parr, who curates Langweilige Postkarten (Boring Postcards Germany) as he did its precursors, Boring Postcards and Boring Postcards USA, has elevated it to an art form in all. What this new collection illustrates graphically is the remarkable similarity between post-war Britain and Germany, in terms of cube-shaped (rather than Cubist), grey, functional designs, unaccountably celebrated in card form as urbanscapes to cherish. Which, with retrospective post-modern irony, they are. Such kitsch could be over-sold, with rhapsodising commentary, but Parr has allowed the imagery space, which is the only way such a project could succeed. Consequently, the cumulative effect is considerable, as you start to manoeuvre through the monotony, eager to spot subtle difference, defining features, and socio-historical meaning. Very quickly, the eye starts to sort the images of East and West, not just through the makes of car (Trabant in the GDR, anything but in the West), but the architectural designs, people's clothes, even the image selection. Roads are straight, service stations, or Autobahn-Raststätten, severe (one stunning card reveals a particularly drab canteen with people sitting meekly at tables, despite all the food displays being closed), petrol filling stations abound, and the key word seems municipal. Even hotels, indulgers of weary flesh, resemble bunkers, or faceless public housing.
Arrayed as if in a family photograph album, the images recall a bygone age of post-war reconstruction, when the emphasis was on logistics: transport, accommodation, and a general, unfussy, symmetrical solidness, symbolised by bad design, and worse upholstery. It's both awful and awe-inspiring, this industrial sprawl and set-square architecture, the bleakly familiar caravan-lined coastline. There is also, presumably to the delight of the curator, a run-of-the-mill, mock-Alpine gasthaus named Hotel Parr. And yet, this is life, as rich in its resurgent functionality as Gaudi's flamboyance. Best enjoyed with a tepid flute of Liebfraumilch, and Kraftwerk on the stereo. --David Vincent
Product Description
160 daringly dull postcards of Germany from the 50s to the 80s. Magnum photographer Martin Parr is a key figure in the world of photography and contemporary art. He has been an avid postcard collector for twenty years. In the final instalment of the Boring Postcards trilogy, he presents the pride of his boring collection: 160 postcards from Germany. Using the same approach as the two previous Boring Postcards (which featured postcards from the UK and the USA), this new book takes you on a daringly dull tour of the autobahns, airports, hotels, factories, shops, border posts, tower blocks and new towns of Germany. All the cards were made before German reunification, and provide fascinating and hilarious insights into German social and architectural values between the 1950s and 1980s. The two nations' special relationship with concrete and the functional modernist block is nostalgically and repetitiously celebrated in postcard after postcard, and the volume provides a revealing context for consideration of the work of contemporary German art and landscape photographers. For a postcard to qualify as sufficiently boring to be included, either its composition, its content, or the characters featured, must be arguably boring or the photograph must be absent of anything which might be described as interesting. Boring Postcards Germany is the crowning glory of the trilogy, the most outrageous and the most boring book of them all. (All of the text for the book will be in German, including the title on the front cover. There will be a belly band, however, giving the English title, Boring Postcards Germany.)
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
This, the third book in the series, is perhaps the most successful. The previous books (of British and American postcards) seemed little more than typical 1950s and 60s retro-kitsch because they lacked the particular historical context that this book has, with its depiction of postwar German society in denial of its catastrophic Nazi past.
These postcard views have no grandiose classical architecture and few scenes that evoke a sentimentalized Germanic past. Instead what we are shown is a calm, clean world of (then) ultra-modern social housing and road networks, of safety and prosperity. All traces of the old pre-war Germany are absent, save for the occasional church spire peeping modestly over the tops of newly constructed facades.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
2 reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Irresistible little gem of a book!
7 April 2003
There is something addictive about this little book, filled with seemingly dull, commercial postcards from Germany. The heft and compact size of it make you want to pick it up again and again and dream about the modern Europe of the 60's and 70's. No words get in the way. The images are of autobahns, health spas, restaurants, apartment buildings...and the overall effect of seeing these tidy, newly built spaces--without people--is somehow poignant, hopeful, serene and surreal. Often, geometric shapes dominate a landscape or visual field, and the postcard becomes a reduced, abstract scene which may or may not have been photographed on earth. "Boring" postcards is strangely fascinating!
6 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Is this the best book I have ever read?
15 July 2001
Amazon Verified Purchase
Yes, this is the best book I have ever read.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Art, Architecture & Photography > Graphic Arts > Postcards
- Books > Calendars, Diaries, Annuals & More > Postcards
- Books > History > Cultural History
- Books > History > Europe > Germany
- Books > Home & Garden > Antiques & Collectables > Antiques & Collectables by Subject > Books, Magazines & Printed Matter
- Books > Home & Garden > Antiques & Collectables > Antiques & Collectables by Subject > Posters & Cards
- Books > Travel & Holiday > Guidebook Series
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
