Paris Postcarte (2010)
Paris Postcarde reimagines the urban landscape through a series of vintage postcards discovered in the French capital. Using found imagery from 1925, Phil Scott creates new compositions that bring together fragments of the city’s public spaces, gardens and everyday life. Through the juxtaposition of these original images, familiar scenes are reconfigured into landscapes that hover between historical record and imagined place.
The series is drawn to the analogue character of the postcards: their printed surfaces, limited perspectives and idealised depictions of a city before the widespread presence of the motor car. None of the source images feature automobiles, offering glimpses of urban environments in which people, public spaces and the rhythms of community appear to occupy a different relationship with their surroundings.
Viewed from a contemporary perspective, these scenes can seem almost surreal in their apparent simplicity. The absence of traffic and the prominence of shared spaces suggest an idealised urban life, prompting questions about how cities have evolved and what has been lost or transformed through modernisation. Yet the postcards are not simply nostalgic records of a better past; they are images shaped by their own time, conventions and aspirations.
By rearranging these fragments of Paris, Scott explores the relationship between memory, representation and the environments we inhabit. Paris Postcarde considers how images preserve particular visions of a place, and how those visions can be reinterpreted through contemporary eyes. The resulting landscapes invite us to reconsider the city not only as a physical environment, but as a collection of memories, possibilities and competing ideas about how we might live together.
