Photographs, vintage postcards and other ephemera


Saturday 19 January 2013

Scandinavian style

I haven't anything quite right to fit this week's Sepia Saturday, so here's something completely different.
A vintage postcard advertising the Park Hotel, Liland, Voss, Norway; the photograph is by Normann, Oslo. The image is so carefully (and badly) staged that it makes me laugh. I don't know which is worse - the wide expanse of grey carpet, those brightly-coloured chairs that drag your eyes relentlessly to the bottom left of the image or the frozen-in-action participants. Even the dog looks bored!

More on- and off-theme entries over at Sepia Saturday

10 comments:

Bob Scotney said...

That hotel is now the Park Hotel Vossevangen and ranked third by Trip Advisor of Voss hotels.

Helen Killeen Bauch McHargue said...

You're right. The photo is terrible and funny at the same time. We see food photos from the same era that are almost painful to look at, the food is so over-styled that it looks like plastic and the colors are so wrong. It's a whole seperate genre isn't it?

21 Wits said...

Different is cool! This is a delightful way to go, and it's so cool to see she brought her best friend along with her too! Great photo as well- very colorful as the fashion trend went to!

Postcardy said...

This is a case where the whole is less than any of its parts. It kind of looks like the photographer couldn't decide what to focus on. Or maybe it was an amateur who wanted to show everything and didn't realize how bad the result was.

Boobook said...

Do you think she was allowed to have the dog in her room?

Alan Burnett said...

I was once in a busy pub when a photographer came in to take a similar photograph to this which would be used in publicity brochures about the pub and would be widely distributed in the local area. All of a sudden the place cleared as men meeting women they should have been meeting, workers drinking during extended lunchbreaks, and - in my case - students in their school uniforms, all ran for the door!

Peter said...

For a minute I thought that was QE in the rear.

Wendy said...

Sleek and modern and spacious - I wonder if that's the message the designer was going for in promoting this hotel.

Oregon Gifts of Comfort and Joy said...

They need a few rugs in that joint! It is a great picture and made me laugh too.

Kathy M.

Mike Brubaker said...

Isn't it good, Norwegian wood?