Vintage Postcards: Depictions of Hawaii

Went down to Bailey's Antiques and Aloha Shirts down on Kapahulu today (http://alohashirts.com/)  to start some research on vintage postcards of Hawaii. With ideas of escapism and tourism in mind, I'm interested in what kinds of postcards visitors were sending back to friends & family. What types of images were portrayed and even better, what were visitors to the islands writing about their experiences, vacations, or deployments? What role did/do postcards play in the exoticism of Hawaii?

I talked to the store owner and learned that in the last 15-20 years vintage Hawaiian postcards have become really expensive, anywhere from $5-100 a piece!!! Whoa, that's a bit out of my league at the moment. I did have a chance to browse a handful of albums with vintage postcards and it was fascinating to see old landscapes and cityscapes. So much has changed and developed.  It's clear now why these seemingly mundane objects have value as historical documents of a time and place.  I found interesting that most of the postcards (at least at this shop) were simple images without any text - many were straight photographs. Seems to me that nowadays many postcards have some kind of cheesy tagline like "Mai Tai Time" or "Aloha from Paradise!" Perhaps, over time the tourism industry started including text when it realized that postcards are an ideal source of free advertising.

http://postcardparadise.blogspot.com/2010/11/were-off-to-hawaii.html

    

http://www.janesoceania.com/hawaii_vintage_postcards10/index1.htm

As far as budget is concerned, I may have to stick with representations of Hawaii in modern-day postcards. Next stop for postcards: ABC Store in Waikiki.

I did find and purchase a $2 United airlines postcard and will scan it shortly. One line from the caption on the back reads "For most people, a visit to Hawaii is not just a routine trip but fulfillment of long-held expectations." This phrase caught my eye because in David Nye's "American Technological Sublime" he considers Clarence Dutton's views on how initial expectations play into, or disrupt, our experience of the sublime. Nye writes,"Ideally, it might seem that the sublime should be an unexpected encounter, a largely unmediated experience of discontinuity between the self and the startling natural object. Because the travel is so prepared in advance, the sublime may seem to be swallowed up by representations in the mass media. Only a prolonged reexperiencing of the site can overcome the egotistical demands of the informed visitor." (15)

Food for thought!