FAQs

What was the genesis of the project?


There was a group of artists at Massey who were exploring landscape or site through photography and they commissioned me to do some research in this area. It very quickly occurred to me that postcards were an apt vehicle to investigate the relationship between photograph and landscape.


The first picture postcards were made in Germany, so that was a natural conversation that emerged from my early research. This relationship with Germany was reinforced by the traffic of ideas created by the ‘Dusseldorf school’ of photography and a certain typological theme that I went about exploring with this exhibition.

The medium is implicitly mobile, which talks to this very contemporary idea about the mobility of the image in digital culture. New technology tools like blogs and email have really replaced the function of postcards so it seemed like good timing to look at the medium again to see what it might offer. Postcards were really the first mass produced photographs, well postcards and pornography, but I wasn’t asked to look into porn.




How did you chose those to be involved?


I have a special interest in the cross over between art and design culture, which started with the video games exhibition I made back in 2003 Arcadia. Part of the way I work is to involve a designer right from the very beginning of a project, as for me, design is a raw ingredient not just a branding or positioning exercise – it’s a mode of thinking. For Sightseeing, we did an initial tender proposal for the design work to three designers working at the intersection of art and design.


For me, design principles often provide a conceptual framework for an exhibition. A great example of what I mean is navigation – which is a key design question for exhibition and publication formats. Navigation can be linear or a more browsing style, and with Sightseeing, it quickly became obvious that a traditional linear publication wasn’t relevant to the project. Then, during our research, we found great historical examples that reinforced our thinking about the concertina style format.




Did you visualise it as a printed object from the outset (and did that change at all as time went on?)


It was conceived as a printed, mass produced project from the outset. I felt this was the best way to draw out the postcard’s role in the objectification of landscape, their complicit role in shaping destinations and itineraries for touristic consumption. Of course these images are not typical tourist postcard shots, they are landscapes that are often ‘hidden’ or ‘unseen’. For instance, these artists are photographing underground spaces, or parking lots, waiting areas, fake or simulated landscapes. It wouldn’t have been the same exhibition if we had used exhibition prints, the postcards are very much part of the look at feel of the project. You can turn them over and read them. You can post them, it was always very important that they function in that way.


Also, it wouldn’t have been able to travel the way that it has if they had been framed photographs; it has been shipped to the UK, Wellington, Auckland and Wanganui. It was always conceived as an exhibition that could travel, that’s what postcards are all about, mobility. Photography packages landscape for consumption, and postcards disseminate those sites for mass consumption, for tourism.


Has the project changed its format over time?


One thing that surprised me during the course of making the exhibition was considering how the value of postcards has shifted so dramatically. Initially they were collected in albums and highly prized as trading cards. Eventually that gave way to a rather more prosaic existence as a marketing device with an expectation that they should be a free giveaway.


Well, there was a lot of discussion about whether the back of the postcards, the written side, should be artist or designer’s ‘real estate’. In the end, rather than let this become a contest for space, we recognized the need to have flexibility in our approach to the format, ‘one size fits all’ was never going to accommodate 90 images and 15 artists. The exhibition allows those differences to be played out in a quite physical way, in comparison to the frame by frame experience of reading the publication. Certainly you get the effect of mass production right away in the exhibition space, because of the repetition of the images.