Vintage Alpine Postcards

Featuring almost a hundred years of dispatches from the Alps, VINTAGE ALPINE POSTCARDS celebrates Europe’s great mountain range. It takes us from men in bowler hats with stout ropes nonchalantly crawling over crevasses, through the gilded age of grand hotels and sleigh rides, to the modernist concrete infrastructure of mountaintop restaurants and cable-car stations.

These postcards frame the changing way we’ve experienced landscape and leisure over more than a hundred years – from the intrepid to the banal, sublime to ridiculous and brutalist to kitsch. And postcards travel through time as well as space, and they arrive with messages from our former selves. Underlying the Alpenkitsch is a serious exposé of our relationship to nature and how we have carelessly misused the beauties of the natural world.

A century of Alpine postcards from the Isola Press archive, VINTAGE ALPINE POSTCARDS celebrates Europe’s great mountain range. These dispatches from the Alps take us from men in bowler hats with stout ropes nonchalantly crawling over crevasses, through the gilded age of grand hotels and sleigh rides, to the modernist concrete infrastructure of mountaintop restaurants and cable-car stations. They frame the changing way we’ve experienced landscape and leisure over more than a hundred years – from the intrepid to the banal, sublime to ridculous and brutalist to kitsch. But postcards travel through time as well as space, and they arrive with messages from our former selves.

Underlying the Alpenkitsch is a serious examination of our relationship to nature and how we have used and abused the beauties of the natural world.And, like sun-burnished memories of holidays past, their sunlit scenes do not necessarily correspond to reality. Postcard makers have always used artifice to conjure fantastic spaces, worlds in which the sky is always blue, the pine trees resplendent and there is always plenty of fresh powder. Featuring great views, architecture, infrastructure Alpinism, hiking and snow sports, VINTAGE ALPINE POSTCARDS is perfect for skiers, hikers, cyclists and mountain lovers. These skaters, skiers, sledgers and St Bernards will surprise and delight mountain aficionados, transporting them to a high altitude holiday wherever they are.

208 pgs, 20 × 17 cm, hardcover