Travelling Trophies
In keeping with my All Abroad! story in the Journal, here is a lovely collection of luggage labels from David Craig’s book Luggage Labels – Mementoes from the Golden Age of Travel (Chronicle Books, 1988).
They are such quaint pieces of graphic design that have vanished from daily appearance in our lives, and with them disappeared the romance of foreign travel. Although I wonder – were travellers actually annoyed to have these bits of paper plastering their matching sets of luggage? Or were they trophies of all the wonderful places they’ve been?
Although I wonder – were travellers actually annoyed to have these bits of paper plastering their matching sets of luggage?
Many years ago I was lucky enough to find a couple of vintage travelling hatboxes that featured two or three labels on the side. I even used them as overnight cases occasionally. I was utterly distraught when I discovered they had become damp and mouldy from storage in the garage one winter – I had to throw them out. In fact, some of my books had also been stored in the garage with them, including this Luggage Labels book, and it is now somewhat warped from the damp – perhaps that is rather apt. (Fortunately it escaped the mould.)
The red suitcase I have now is also vintage, purchased a couple of years ago from an enormous vintage bazaar on the Mornington Peninsula. I store all my props in it.
The wonderfully evocative Canadian Pacific poster is from another book on graphic design of the Art Deco period: British Modern – Graphic Design Between the Wars, by Steven Heller and Louise Fili.
Click through to the Vintage Luggage Labels gallery to view twenty more labels.
It’s A Wonkyful World
South Melbourne, 15 April 2011 :: Bettie XL // Blanko Noir // RedEye GelShortly after I got my first iPhone, my friend Sapphire introduced me to the wonders of Hipstamatic. At the time, I was working on a freelance assignment in a quiet neighbourhood. There was little to do at lunchtime bar wandering around the residential back streets, surreptitiously taking photos of anything that caught my eye.
Once or twice suspicious residents accosted me, but I managed to pacify them with my sheepish explanation that I was merely playing around with a new camera app. But it meant I modified my photographic technique with quick, furtive movements – and serendipitously I discovered another wonderful effect of the slow camera shutter: distortion.
Rambling Roses, 2 June 2010 :: Helga Viking // Float // No flashAs I walked along, I would pause mid-stride, snap a photo with a quick flick of the wrist, and continue on my way. Back then, Hipstamatic made you wait while each single photograph developed, so often I didn’t see the distortion until I was well away from the subject. This was annoying at first, since this had not been my goal at all, but before long I grew to love the result. It was random and organic, and somehow I could rarely create the effect deliberately. Genuine furtiveness seemed to be the key.
Sadly, the new iPhone 4s is just too quick for these photographic shenanigans, and I can no longer successfully capture a wonkyful picture. Check out the set in the It’s A Wonkyful World Hipstagallery. I have a lot more photos, but shooting with the random function on left me with too many dud combinations. These are the best of them. Enjoy.
Melbourne City, 17 April 2011 :: Kaimal Mark II // Claunch 72 Monochrome // No flash
Indie Posters
The Adventures of Artiomka, RussiaFilm posters are part of the urban landscape. We see them everywhere. Sometimes they are so generic that one banal film is indistinguishable from another. But not in Poland.
A tradition of poster art began with the emergence of a poster school in the late 1950s, lead by the painter, drawer and graphic artist, Henryk Tomaszewski. Everyone wanted a piece from this community of artists: for many years there was no film, opera or theatre premiere, concert, festival or other public event without a poster. One artist recalls that at the height of demand he was making a poster every week, and had to even decline commissions.
Japanese moster moviesFilms from around the world were reimagined by a great number of different artists, in a multitude of styles. These posters are works of art, a far cry from the commercial propositions inflicted on us today. Sadly, with the changes in applied graphics globally, the tradition of popular poster art is in decline in Poland. It is now more likely to be seen on the walls of an art gallery rather than plastered on the brick wall of a pub.
Read more about the history of this fine art at Polish Poster, where you can also purchase a vintage poster or three. Scroll down for some more of my favourites.
Scarlet Sails, Russia
An Event, Yugoslavia
The Man Who Wanted to Live Forever, Canada
Sunset Boulevard, USA
Sombrero, Russia
The Grasshopper, Russia
What is Beauty?
‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’ This, one of the most trite and oft repeated phrases ever, handed as a sop to plain women, remains true nevertheless. Beauty, in reference to physical appearance – and art – interests me, principally because the notion is so entirely subjective, and because so many proclaim loudly against its validity.
The subject was recently brought back to mind after reading about software that was supposed to ‘beautify’ people. Pictorial examples were given, and one comment caught my attention: a reader asserted that the (supposedly) more beautiful version of the subject was bland and boring. The implication being that even naturally attractive people (with regular features) are bland and boring. What an insult to a large and lucky proportion of the population.
Beauty is of course not the be all and end all, but it is dishonest and utterly disingenuous to dismiss it as unimportant. There have been numerous studies done to attest that human beings are naturally attracted to symmetry, proportion, and balance. Most human beings pursue beauty in one form or another – if it was unimportant in our lives, we would not do so.
Equally, art that is beautiful is often sniffily dismissed as the merely ‘decorative’, appealing only to the untutored masses and should therefore be pooh-poohed by the serious art critic.
We do however live in a time of mass obsession with youth, beauty and artifice, when natural beauty and aging gracefully has gone by the board. Sadly, too many forget to tend to the beauty and spirit within, where true grace resides. A so-called ‘ordinary’ man or woman will suddenly become beautiful when they move, when their eyes light up, when joy animates them; still photos show so little of the subject they depict.
The original article from The New York Times is very interesting. An excerpt from it (wow, this professor said the same thing I did just above, and I promise I wrote it before I read the article! I feel smart …):
“The first reaction we have to faces will be based on face symmetry, health, averageness,” said Alexander Nehamas, a philosopher and professor of the humanities and comparative literature at Princeton, who has written about beauty. “But we never see a face like that in real life. We see faces in connection with people expressing emotions and ideas, all those aspects of the face are essential to our deciding whether a face or a person is beautiful.”
Here are some words and pictures on the topic from the book What is Beauty?, by Dorothy Schefer (Thames & Hudson, 1997). Click images for larger versions.
Blueys*
Welcome back to the Inter-Universe Beauty Pageant, tan-tan-taraaah! It’s been a while since we last tuned in.
First up we have Helta Higgins who hails from Fantasia. A rather horsey looking creature, Helta is an airline hostess, and calls the capital, Fairyflod home. The population of Fantasia is quite small: only two thousand on the last census. Not counting the little people, that is. They are quite small, but great in number.
Miss Georgianna Dan is a blue-haired, blue-skinned (no relation to the inhabitants of Pandora) waitress from Kiteia (pronounced Kye-tey-aa), servicing the industries constructing a dome that will encircle the entire planet. It’s all a bit Total Recall really.
Rane’s erudite representative Gladys Hallman is a life biologist. Rane, apparently, is very like Canada. They even have track trees, similar to the maple. No mention of syrup though. Surely that would be a virtue?
Until next time, when we’ll see a final four contestants and learn the results of the galaxy-wide voting … I can hardly wait, can you?
Don’t forget, you can enjoy full viewing pleasure of the Galaxy Gallery here!
* Bluey is an Aussie slang term for a redhead