(Image credit: Robert I. Pitchford)
Vintage postcards are so cool. Those who couldn’t afford to travel in the 1930s and ‘40s could dream of the brightly-colored places seen on linen postcards. Curt Teich of Teich & Co. produced over 45,000 different linens postcards, and is the subject of the book Postcard America: Curt Teich and the Imaging of a Nation, 1931-1950 by Jeffrey L. Meikle. Meikle explains how Teich became so prominent in the business. One of his secrets was photographer and postcard salesman G.I. Pitchford, who had an artist’s touch.
One example of how Pitchford’s instinct for profit was combined with the artistry of the retouchers can be found in a 1940 postcard titled “Mt. Lemmon Road, near Tucson, Arizona.” Upon first glance,
Pitchford’s black-and-white source photo, shot the same year the card was published, is unremarkable. In the foreground we see his 1940 Buick sedan parked next to a saguaro cactus, its needles glistening like a spiky halo in the southwestern sun. Ahead of the car, the road angles to the right before bending sharply to left, hugging the curving topography of an inclined ridge. And way off in the distance, in the upper-left corner of Pitchford’s picture, is Tucson, or so we are told in Meikle’s book—the city itself is impossible to see with the naked eye.
What Pitchford’s photograph lacks in technical prowess it makes up in composition, and that was all the retouchers in Chicago needed to produce a postcard worthy of the C. T. Art-Colortone trademark. Thus, the road in the final postcard is a deep rusty red, as were so many unpaved roads in the Southwest in those days, while the cactus-strewn hillside is ablaze in color, as if caught at peak bloom after a particularly wet winter. The “effect of the sun shining thru the needles,” as Pitchford had described the cactus in a note written on the frisket—the sheet of tracing paper protecting his photograph from damage—is preserved, just as the sales agent had specified.
Importantly, the retouchers did more than just follow orders. Pitchford’s Buick is now cropped at the car’s trunk, giving it the illusion of movement that the original photo lacks. As for the sky, alluring bands of orange and turquoise have replaced the gray haze of Pitchford’s black-and-white. The result is an obvious, fabulous fake, but definitely something you’d want to mail to a friend.
(Image credit: courtesy University of Texas Press)
Read more about how the popular Teich linen postcards were made at Collectors Weekly.