To hold the whole spread of the distance
Keamogetse Mosienyane on Arthur Erickson’s postcards as photographic annotations
Postcard from trip to Japan, ca. 1961. Canadian Architectural Archives, University of Calgary Libraries and Cultural Resources. Photograph by Matthieu Brouillard © CCA
During his early travels in Europe and Asia, Arthur Erickson’s epistolary exchange with his family, friends, and colleagues was instrumental in building dialogue about architectural reflections—and continued companionship. Postcards, in particular, provided a way for him to share quick visual curiosities with short observations apart from his comprehensive and detailed letters. An observation in passing, a thoughtful message, a view in sight, an image of a revered site—postcards allowed Erickson to share his travel moments with his close friends and kin. The act of sending postcards is a memory-building practice, which, for Erickson, opened a portal for his recipients to be invited into the world he was experiencing on-site. By sending postcards in addition to letters, he invited his family and friends as guests on his travels.
Postcard of Jikoin temple, Japan. Canadian Architectural Archives, University of Calgary Libraries and Cultural Resources
The postcard above shows the view of the Yamato Plain from the Jikoin temple in Nara, Japan. Wood beams “hold the whole spread of the distance, the fringe of the pine on the side, the long horizontal of the hedge, sand and the veranda interrupted only by a beautifully small pine clipped so you see every branch and needle,” as described by Erickson in a letter to Gordon Webber in 1961.1 During this trip to Japan, he spent substantial time in various traditional Japanese gardens and temples. The Jiko-in temple and garden granted him the time and space to take in slow and intentional design practices such as Japanese pruning; as Erickson notes, “in Japanese pruning, everything is given space to breathe.”2 This ideology later influenced his design interests in articulating light, cadence, and space. Travel expanded Erickson’s ways of seeing the world from diverse perspectives and different scales.
Verso of postcard: : « C’était ma villa montagnarde privée pendant quelques jours »
Erickson believed that architecture must be in dialogue with its surroundings and environment and that no building should exist in isolation nor be alienated from the site on which it is built. The postcards in his archive communicate a context to these surroundings he witnessed, as a form of site writing and representation. The short text on the postcard— “this was my private mountain villa for a few days”—is written with no address or recipient’s name, almost as if this was a note to annotate the photograph for identification and archiving purposes for his personal collection. We found several postcards in Erickson’s archives, most without notes or an address. Some recorded landscape views, others monuments, and others historic artworks. Erickson was a collector of postcards, which seemed to be additional visual souvenirs of the places he visited and the monuments he saw, complementing his rich photographic archive.
The postcard’s dual function as a memory and a documentary image is distinctive among types of photographic representation. The idealized and pristine images of postcards and their commercialization and mass marketing often overshadow their role in tracing key landscapes and landmarks in historical and archival research. Yet, as in Erickson’s archives, postcard photographs provide a localized perspective and a rich record of architectural histories, bridging “the whole spread of the distance” of his travels as a young architect.
