I got drawn into deltiologist James Brouwer’s enormous postcard collection after watching Vox’s short film on his discovery that many of them feature the exact same sky. Delving further into his flickr albums, I found myself mesmerised by this set that identifies another midcentury trend, simply titled Onlooker Postcards. Individually, the cards are unremarkable – just perfectly pleasant photos of lakes, mountains, forests, with the addition of a token onlooker taking in the scene. But gathered together, there’s something rather eery about them. With characters dressed in Don’t Look Now-evoking bright red, passively absorbing the environment with their backs to the camera, they’re like screenshots from some unsettlingly placid video game – imagine Daphne du Maurier’s Red Dead Vacation. An uncanny narrative conjured by repetition and the hand of the collector.
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