VINTAGE ALPINE POSTCARDS celebrates our relationship with Europe's great mountain range. These dispatches from the Alps take us from men in bowler hats with stout ropes nonchalantly crawling over crevasses, through the gilded age of grand hotels and sleigh rides, to the modernist concrete infrastructure of mountaintop restaurants and cable-car stations - framing the changing the way we've experienced landscape and leisure over more than a hundred years. Underlying the Alpenkitsch is a serious examination of our relationship to nature and how we have used and abused the beauties of the natural world. Postcards travel through time as well as space, they arrive with messages from our former selves. But, like sun-burnished memories of holidays past, they do not necessarily correspond to reality. Postcard makers have always combined reality with artifice to conjure fantastic spaces, worlds in which the sky is always blue, the pine trees resplendent and there is always plenty of fresh powder. These skaters, skiers, sledgers and St Bernards will surprise and delight mountain aficionados, transporting them to a high altitude holiday wherever they are.
