Picky Postcards

Author's Note

Picky Postcards began as a lockdown project, inspired by the artwork posted on Instagram by Amber Share. Now a book called Subpar Parks, it consists of travel posters designed by Share which combine her colourful graphic renditions of US national parks with typography of bad reviews each park has received from Yelp, Google, and Tripadvisor.    

I thought it would be fun to create my own series of anti-travel postcards on the same theme, and at the time, I genuinely believed that this was going to be a new lockdown trend that everyone was going to get behind. I dutifully took part in almost every lockdown fad, and to this day, still bake my own bread. 

However, I've only ever seen one other person make bad review art, and that was a Cornish artist who painted beautiful scenes from her local area, underscored by mean reviews from disgruntled tourists. 

I think in the other examples I've given, the viewer is supposed to feel derisively amused by the bad reviews - by their ignorance, their arrogance, their entitlement, or their sheer audacity of complaining about some of the most desirable travel locations in the world. And yes, to an extent I share those judgements. 

However, as a notoriously bad traveller myself, I can't help also feeling some measure of sympathy for the reviewers. Sure, they might be spoiled, culturally insensitive, and have done little to no research about their destination before blithely hopping on a budget flight, but the fact remains they spent time, energy, and money on a trip where they patently failed to have a good time.

And their 1-star reviews are not unhelpful either. The stark summing up of Iceland certainly made me take it off my bucket list, while the woman in Marrakesh (I feel sure it was a woman) who was traumatised by snakes gave me pause. Nor do 1-star reviews necessarily put you off a destination; the many complaints of places being "boring" made me instantly more likely to book a trip there. 

The selection of destinations was done while watching repeats of Travel Man: 48 Hours in ..., hosted at that time by comedy actor Richard Ayoade. Each postcard is from an episode of the British television show, which chooses locations suitable for a weekend; mostly European, with occasional forays into Asia, the Middle East, north Africa, and the United States. If I ever do another Picky Postcards, it would be of Australian tourist attractions.

Why am I posting this? Well, I have nowhere else to store my postcards, and I don't want to delete them. I will be updating weekly until I run out of postcards. Subscribe to be notified, and feel free to leave your own reviews, 1-star or otherwise, in the comments!