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• 1 media/ElizabethBishopPostcardsCase 10.jpg 2023-09-21T21:17:10+00:00 Postcard Aesthetics 2 plain 2023-12-13T16:09:38+00:00 One of the most visually striking ideas to emerge from a study of Bishop’s picture postcards is their relationship to and influence on her use of unconventional perspectives, obscured views, and juxtapositions of subject and scale in her poems, watercolors, and photographs. Picture postcard “views” emerged from the longer history of landscape painting and topographical writing, but as modern media forms they were also shaped by technology, urban landscapes, and modernism in the arts. Many of the picture postcards Bishop mailed feature unconventional perspectives: a view of the Capitol framed and obscured by cherry blossoms; the vista of Copacabana beach screened by shaded woods; a tiny view of a Scandinavian herring boat at sea glimpsed through wooden racks of dried herring on the shore. Readers of Bishop's poetry will recognize her use of unconventional perspectives (e.g. “Sleeping on the Ceiling,” “Sleeping Standing Up”).
  
  As her 1950 poem “View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress” illustrates, Bishop used offset vantage points to challenge dominant perspectives and established hierarchies of power, knowledge, and value. Postcards of the Capitol commonly presented offset views. A number of picture postcards published prior to 1950 with titles nearly identical to Bishop’s poem (e.g. “U.S. Capitol, as seen from the Library of Congress”) emphasized the dramatic line of trees that divides the two buildings and interrupts the view, echoed by Bishop’s lines: "The giant trees stand in between / I think the trees must intervene" (P 67). 
  
  Bishop’s debt to postcard aesthetics is particularly notable in her photographic slides and watercolors, many of them postcard-sized. The watercolor “County Courthouse” depicts the courthouse obstructed by palms and downed wires, implying the vulnerability of human institutions to nature’s greater power. Bishop’s color slides also foreground tangles of wires in front of buildings. Many present views in which trees or plants “intervene.” And many of Bishop’s photographic slides, as well as watercolors such as “Palais du Senat” and “Mérida from the Roof,” take a rooftop perspective familiar from Bishop’s picture postcards.
  
  Bishop addressed the importance of postcard aesthetics in her appreciation of Gregorio Valdes, a Cuban painter in Key West who she commissioned to paint her home. Bishop noted that his “views” are “are almost all copies of photographs or of reproductions of other pictures” (Pr 31), including “copies of local postcards” (Pr 26). However, “he managed to make just the right changes in perspective and coloring to give [the painting] a peculiar and captivating freshness, flatness, and remoteness” (Pr 31). Valdes followed a process remarkably similar to that developed by the Curt Teich company to create linen postcards in the 1930s and 40s (the View of the Capitol obscured by cherry blossoms is a Teich linen postcard). Teich began with a photo or photo-collage, which was airbrushed and then turned into a hand painted watercolor (Meikle 8-9, 59-65); the painterly application of color to mass-produced images resulted in a “heightened visual reality” (Meikle 59). Bishop was also interested in this middle ground between originality and copying, artisanal and mechanical reproduction: notably, her watercolor “Tombstones for Sale” closely resembles a linen postcard she mailed to her Aunt Grace in 1957, “Street Scene with Poinciana in Bloom, Key West, Fla.” (VC 98.3).