POSTCARDS (FOR TOURISTS OF DECAY)

At many of Shetland’s war-ruins sites there can be found ‘lookouts’ and pillboxes from which military personnel would have defended crucial locations nearby. The windows in these lookouts frame parts of the environment outside, landscapes often largely unchanged since the sites were occupied. When we stand and look through these vantage points we can see the world much as it once has appeared to another person in a another time – in many ways an experience comparable to the viewing of a photograph. We can imagine servicemen in wartime waiting and watching here, a lookout window or pillbox loophole almost like the viewfinder of a camera, offering a contained viewpoint through which to see the vast landscape outside. 

It seems we have many ways to establish ‘lookouts’ or viewpoints for ourselves from which to see the world. The photographic image for instance, an invention of modern times, has allowed us to capture and also try and make sense of our complex modern environment, a place where developments in scientific understanding have not only led to innovative technologies, but also to new forms of weaponry and warfare. Photography has continuously advanced along with the progress of our modern and more recently digital age, and older forms of traditional film photography are now often viewed with wistfulness and nostalgia for old technologies.

In the ‘War Ruins of Shetland’ postcards seen here, I artificially evoked qualities of old photographs using photo-editing software, giving my digital images a nostalgic sepia tone in disconcerting contrast with their more sinister subject matter. Nostalgic emulation of the past, as discussed by Paolo Magagnoli in his essay ‘Critical Nostalgia in the Art of Joachim Koester’ (2011), need not always be a regressive or ‘rose-tinted’ approach, but can alternatively tell us something about our present. Magagnoli talks of the progressive potential of nostalgia to “become a strategy to defamiliarise the present and to open up a space for utopian imagination” [1]. During visits to Shetland’s war-ruin sites, it often seemed that the present was a little ‘less familiar’. These ruins were futuristic despite being in states of decay, simultaneously seeming to belong to both a war-scarred past and an apocalyptic version of the future. At these sites, the chronology of history seemed less certain - and the ‘present’ suddenly something more strange and ethereal.

When photographing Shetland’s austere war ruin sites, my images often strangely seemed to have ‘picturesque’ qualities, for instance in the way landscape featured – in grasses softly framing bunker entrances, or in views of the sea giving dramatic backdrops to cliff-top lookouts. I often considered tourist picture-postcards, a nostalgic tradition which has allowed visitors to send home snapshots of their travels since Edwardian times [2]. Postcard images tend to of course avoid the unsightly or dilapidated, capturing instead scenic locations. In using my images of war-ruins to make a set of postcards, I was interested in creating a kind of alternative ‘scenic tour’ around Shetland. Although usually overlooked on the visitor-trail, these more austere parts of the landscape are reminders that in-amongst the picturesque parts of our natural environment are often relics from more sinister events in history. 

Aimee Labourne, 2016

1.     MAGAGNOLI, Paolo. 2011. ‘Critical Nostalgia in the Art of Joachim Koester’. Oxford Art Journal, 34 (1), 97 – 121. 

2.     HUDSON, Norman. 1992. Souvenir Postcards from Shetland: Shetland in Picture Postcards. Lerwick, Shetland: The Shetland Times Ltd.