From Our House to Your House a Collection of Home-made pictorial Christmas cards from the 1930s to the 1990s Martin Parr Photography

The Presentation House Gallery has a great bookshop for photography titles. I picked up another Martin Parr book: From Our House to Your House.

This is a collection of home-made pictorial Christmas cards, from the 1930s to the 1990s. There is the usual cavalcade of outdated fashion, poor taste, and even worse humour. Families arrayed in their Sunday best, stiff and upright, or laboriously showing off their skills as performers or musicians. The 1979 card from "The Ritchie family": full colour, appalling clothes, dubious mantelpiece ornaments, porn-star moustaches. The 1980 card from Merrily and Dick Gifford, their children "Debbie, Deanna, Dick, Dan, Daurie, Ann, David, and Dicksie" all lined up by the side of the pool.

Most extraordinary, however, are the image manipulations. Often these entail distortions of scale: a family playing among outsize Christmas baubles, for instance. And there's a peculiar fascination with the notion of giant children who have their parents, literally, in the palm of their hands.


These cards (and their attendant Christmas letters) are the means by which American families presented themselves to the world, to their extended network of friends and acquaintances. But the cracks and faultlines within those families are also all too visible, all too painfully on show.

De invloedrijke Brits fotograaf Martin Parr heeft lang ansichtkaarten en andere fotografische ephemera verzameld en publiceerde verschillende boeken met behulp van dit materiaal, met inbegrip van saai ansichtkaarten. Dit boek bevat een selectie van gepersonaliseerde kerstkaarten uit de jaren 1950 tot de jaren 1970 dat dat gezinnen zou zelf maken of van aanpassen leeg voorgedrukt voordat ze worden verzonden naar vrienden en relaties. Een eigenzinnige boekje voor het feestelijke seizoen.

Hardback in gewatteerde rode covers en in uitstekende staat.


Door dewi lewis publiceren, Stockport 2002 gepubliceerd. Eerste editie.

Bint photoBooks on INTernet would like to wish you a happy holiday weekend. All the Best & Thank you for another fun and memorable year!