Boringpostcards offer unreconstructed nostalgia. Their nostalgic value derives from the eye, mind and memory of the viewer, not the "creative" machinations of a boardroom of Saatchian arch-manipulators. Nor from the pettypolitical/cultural motivations of a boardroom of tokenist chardonnay art-bureaucrats. There is no straw filter, no lachrymose strings, no yearning melancholic guitar, no deep voiced voiceover wallowing in self-congratulatory retrospective wisdom. No forced fake vision of blissful biculturalism. No opportunity to cheat (or "enhance") the past by reconstructing it with film crew and editing suite. Boringpostcardsville is no imaginary poet's idyll. It was real. < >
(a) Accidental Nationalism
Boringpostcards from NZ do not look like they're from any other country. Martin Parr's books demonstrate that this is also true of British, American and German boringpostcards. The truth and distinctiveness of boringpostcards derives from the mundaneness of their subject matter. The closer the eye gets to an everyday scene, the more we see that it is filled with authentic and apparent detail that no set designer, no advertising creative executive, no award-winning author of fictional literature, could ever imagine, much less capture.
