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Bicycles, Vintage People On Photo Postcards, Tom Phillips (2011)
Bodleian Library, 9781851243686 112pp £15
A sepia-tinted journey into the age when Starley and Dunlop expanded
everyman's horizons
 
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Among the bicycle's many exceptional features are its incidental aesthetic
qualities. There is something about the simple geometry of a push iron
that holds a seemingly endless appeal - particularly juxtaposed with the
human form.
It is a quality that was not lost on the early adopters of the pedal-powered
transportational miracle. Late Victorian and Edwardian photo studios did
a good trade in portraits - a great many of them featuring their subjects
standing beside their two-wheeled steeds.
This volume collects together a couple of hundred examples of the genre.
Many are from studios, with painted backdrops featuring magnificent mansions
and roaring seas. Others are taken out on the road. For the most part
they are posed shots - bonneted ladies in long skirts pushing their trusty
roadsters, couples beside their tandems and a few camping groups with
their bicycles arranged around tents.
Dating from the dawn of the safety bicycle to the 1950s, they provide
a haunting glimpse into the distant world of rational dress, rod brakes
and chaincase oil baths.
The only information about who these people are, or what they are doing
comes from the messages the back - something that is found on only a few
of them. This is a frustration at first - although there is fun to be
had allowing the imagination to fill in the blanks.
It is sad not to see more pictures of subjects actually using their
bikes. Clearly this was not the stuff of portrait photography - although
it made me yearn for a book of cycling pictures drawn from documentary
photographers' back catalogues. And, it would have been nice to see a
few more recent pictures - although no doubt, copyright issues make the
1950s counterparts of these snaps rather harder to publish.
Nonetheless, taken together these pictures provide a curiously affecting
transport into the lives of the generation who first experienced the joys
of life on two wheels.
PS Mar 11
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