A four-part X-ray of my right knee; Luther by Cranach; the princes in the tower by Hippolyte Delaroche; Tourcoing's pompier hotel de ville; the Hotel de Mansour, Casablanca, by night, 1962; Port-St-Louis-du-Rhône's docks at about the same date; a plastic 3D version of Millet's Angelus; the same painter's Spring – a rainbow, light after a storm, the edge of an orchard; two bronze bulls at Lascaux; containers and pylon by Emma Matthews; the casino at Royan; an eerie Tristram Hillier-esque painting of two 1950s houses on dunes – the designer, and maybe the painter, was Allert Warners; Illinois commuters by Dan Weiner; Gottfried Böhm's Mariendom at Neviges; a group of dwarves in Ruritanian uniform saluting...
These are a few of the subjects of the postcards that hang in my apartment in neat, cleverly designed, flexible, double-sided, transparent kits suspended from the ceilings. Such postcard-holders are cheap. Which is appropriate, for postcards, too, are cheap. The reproduction of great paintings is merely one of the uses to which a postcard can be put. But it is an important one. It is not so much populist as popularising; there is a difference. The dissemination of such work in a version approximately 150x100mm is supremely democratic. I happily suffer a delusion of ownership without the attendant insurance costs and security concerns.
The chief purpose of an original has, for several centuries, been the provision of images to be copied with increasing degrees of verisimilitude. The ectype's importance has long eclipsed the archetype's. The original, in any medium susceptible to reproduction, is an object to be traded by its maker or its maker's dealer, to be coveted by its maker's patrons, public and private. It should not concern us if the avaricious – drawn by the bogus allure of the handmade – lock away what are the analogues of first editions; nor should it concern us if acrylic paintings detrite to the point where they are irrecoverable. They are preserved for ever in reproduction – in monographs, catalogues and, especially, as postcards, with which we may construct our personal museums of sumptuous humility.
I have thousands of postcards but seldom send one, seldom receive one either. Few, indeed, have any personal association, although there are some exceptions: here's one of the newly built Highbury Avenue school in Salisbury, where my mother taught during the war; here's one she sent me from Lourdes that ends with the words "pity them" ("them" being the desperate and the gullible, the crippled Catholics sold a pup by their faith).
Postcards are for collecting and scrutinising and delving into the lives of others. As bearers of greetings, brief messages, thanks and dutiful holiday cliches, they are ancient technology: pre-telephone, let alone mobile phone, SMS, antisocial networking, Twitter and so on. Yet they persist in a way that, say, public telephones do not. They began to transcend their function, their supposed function, a century ago: 750 million cards were sent annually in Britain during the decade before the first world war.
Since then, the volume has been constantly diminishing. Nonetheless, over 100 million were posted in the UK last year: Brighton and Scarborough were the most popular postmarks, followed by Bournemouth, Blackpool and Skegness. Those towns make it easy to guess, presumptuously, at both the images and the ritual flurry of exclamation marks. But that doesn't matter. They are mute, unselfconscious social-historical documents, bland emblems of the everyday whose value will not be recognised for years hence.
Martin Parr's Boring Postcards (that adjective is a porkie the size of an elephant) and David Liaudet's Architectures de Cartes Postales gather the work of unknown photographers who recorded the spread of motorways, caravan parks, new towns, hyperbolic paraboloid roofs and churches in the round. These photographers did so artlessly, improbably realising that, half a century later, they would provide not merely glimpses into the freshly built world of Macmillan, Wilson and les Trente Glorieuses (as the period from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s became known in France), but a powerfully oblique portrait of a long disappeared age of optimism.
The Postcard Century is even more ambitious: postcards have multiple roles and Tom Phillips's wonderful book shows the lot. Fine art transformed to kitsch, propaganda, gorblimey bawdy, sentimentality, adverts, sublimity, technological oddities, self-mutilation: it is rich, chaotic, insensate – like the 20th century itself. Fragments of messages exacerbate the confusion.
It was the example of these publications and their concentration that prompted me to consider publishing my own photographs at postcard size in book form. From there, it was a short step (or moron's stagger) to resolving to go the whole hog and publish 100 of them as sendable, stampable, frankable postcards with a line down the middle (apparently a "rile" – etymology unknown) and a top-right quadrangle showing where to affix the stamp (a "neeb", named after Dieter Neeb, the publisher from Fulda in Bavaria who invented the marking – until 1915, the majority of the world's cards, in whatever language, were produced in Germany).
They are presented in a boxette (not quite a neologism). Some of them bear captions that would improbably be found on "real" postcards. But then they aren't "real"– they merely pretend to be. They're as bogus as a nine-bob note. The book's title, Pidgin Snaps, is intended to imply a deliberate impurity, a gauged mongrelism, a collision of idioms and styles. It is also inversely snobbish, as if I am defensively dismissive and don't really care. If only!
The origin of this project was the combination of a new camera and a more than usually grubby motor. I took both into a carwash. The multicoloured rollerbrushes buffeted and swooshed. Without thinking about it, I aimed the camera at the sudsy windscreen. Bingo! Abstract expressionism for beginners: no making marks, no inhalation of noxious fumes, no splattering clothes. The randomness was thrilling and liberating. Here was the antithesis of pondering an adjective, of conducting an internal debate about a colon, of searching for a simile, of trying to figure whether a phrase is one's own invention or is recalled from a distant external source. I suddenly felt myself strangely drawn to carwashes. And to nocturnal rainstorms, especially in areas of gaudy neon and plentiful brakelights.
Soon I was devising set-ups that, although purpose-made, left room for chance. Plastic bags filled with coloured liquids provide the raw material for scenes of apocalyptic mayhem. I submit drawings, scrawls, daubs to what the Polish-French painter Ladislas Kijno called froissage: essentially scrunching up the paper or aluminium foil so that it is as wrinkled as Auden's balls. Then there were found objects: rusty doors, nacreous petrol puddles, flint, scrolls of bark, grimy, frosted glass. Photograph them, edit them – the eschewal of artifice (choosing not to adjust saturation, desaturation, tone, contrast, brightness) would have smacked of the very purity I wished to avoid.
Admittedly, the use of such devices chases out randomness. But practising what I preached to myself would be altogether too perfect. This process, or school of one, is one that I called Liddism. A painting I did of Calvary (a sort of abattoir) was deemed so unpleasant that it was banished to a terrace where it began to oxidise. A friend who almost stepped on it looked at it with a certain distaste and asked: "Is it the lid of something?" She made it clear that whatever that something was, she did not want to come into contact with it.
Many of the subjects of the naturalistic snaps – there are infinite degrees of naturalism – are determined by places I have filmed or have recce'd for films. I rarely use a photograph as an aide-memoire. It is rather the act of making the photograph that lends a site or scene mnemonic glue. This process is akin to taking notes that, once written, are seldom referred to. There is then a Scottish bias, a French bias, an Essex bias. There is not a person bias. The world of Pidgin Snaps, like the world of my films, is largely devoid of people. But people's interventions – shacks, cars, chimneys, roads, pylons, silos, landfill sites – are omnipresent. Nowhere is the poorer for humankind's amendments. Unmitigated nature is absent: "beautiful views", "unspoiled landscapes" and "pretty spots" are clichés to feed the aesthetic prejudices of the unthinking.
While it would be ludicrous to claim that these cards have a didactic purpose, they do manifest qualities that are beyond prettiness, perhaps even contrary to it. They celebrate the overlooked – which comes in myriad guises and owes its status to not having (so to speak) been framed, to not having been photographed or painted or otherwise brought to our attention. There is much that we have not been taught to notice.
"Everyone has a book inside them."
"And that, precisely, is where it should stay."
The book in question was probably a never-to-be-written novel or memoir. And sure, Pidgin Snaps isn't a book. But everyone is now a photographer, sort of. The democratising effects of digitisation have blurred the line for photographers who are not qualified by "sort of". I'm acutely conscious that I am trespassing into other people's territory. I'm equally conscious of the mix of pity and ennui that writing by people who can't write provokes.
Pidgin Snaps by Jonathan Meades is published by Unbound on 12 November, £19.99
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