Photo: Motor Car, 1909 Weston-Super-Mare. Courtesy of the Tom Phillips Collection
Kristen Bailey stands by her aspidistra and smiles at the National Portrait Gallery’s show of postcard portraits of ordinary Britons.
We Are The People: Postcards from the Collection of Tom Phillips is on at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), London, until June 20. Linked to the exhibition is a display of postcards at the Horniman Museum.
The exhibition presents over 1000 postcards selected from the extensive collection of artist, Tom Phillips, who describes himself as 'an inveterate collector – an anorak'.
Phillips, who is a trustee of the NPG, says that he and his fellow trustees have a duty "to make this place less elitist…most of the portraits in the Gallery are of toffs and high achievers".
In contrast We Are The People aims to put together, he says, "an alternative National Portrait Gallery featuring the rest of the nation - those that did the work, bore the children, fought the wars - the previously unknown and unsung".
Photo: Aspidistra, Photographer Unknown. Courtesy of the Tom Phillips Collection
In 1902, the British Post Office first permitted writing on the reverse of postcards and this kickstarted a craze for photographic postcard portraits, which were widely available and cheap to produce. Here they are displayed in themes, such as Soldiers, Make Believe, Studio Seas, Aspidistra and Workers.
Aspidistra features people all standing next to an aspidistra (or several). The aspidistra was considered to lend its owner an air of middle class respectability (before it was immortalised in song by the very working class Gracie Fields). One family has even posed with their aspidistra in the middle of a field.
Studio Seas shows us seaside holidaymakers who have chosen not to be photographed by the real sea, but have instead been snapped leaning on fake rocks in front of a painted and more suitably dramatic seascape.
Photo: Britannia, Unknown Photographer. Courtesy of the Tom Phillips Collection
Many of the images will raise a smile – the one of the bandsman, with his baby daughter poking her head out of his upturned tuba for example, and Master Polish with his suit covered in shoe polish tin lids.
Others are poignant – such as all the photos in the Soldier section. Most of these men are very young, nearly all are undecorated. Did they ever come home?
The images in Workers: The Office are strikingly reminiscent of Ricky Gervais’ acclaimed BBC comedy series - the boss at his impressive desk, someone pretending to make a call and rows of clerks all trying to look efficient, pens poised.
So things haven’t changed as much as we might think. In 100 years it could be you up here.
"Nostalgia is irrelevant…these are stored memories for the future", says Phillips. "These people are having their picture taken because they’re proud of their new fashionable haircut or their new bike – much as I might with my brand new mobile phone. They have no sense of looking quaint. They are modern."
