© billwisserphoto.com / drr.net
Member Bill Wisser just added these arresting new images to Marketplace and shared these comments:
"I wanted to let you know about the beautiful, eye-catching, charming, historic -- and very usable -- vintage postcards from the 1930s, '40s, '50s and '60s I've been collecting, photographing (or scanning), key-wording and posting to Marketplace this week.
In many cases, especially with the classic "Greetings From Florida" cards that featured state maps illuminated with little drawings of tourist attractions and activities, I've zoomed in and captured the details at five or more times life-size, so they look like Pop-Art, Roy Lichtenstein comic book masterpieces, with visible half-tone dots, like this detail from a stylish, linen-finish, 1938 card:
© billwisserphoto.com / drr.net
By the way, I've researched the copyright question very thoroughly for all the cards. And the bottom line is basically all cards produced before the 1978 revision of the copyright law are in the public domain if they lacked a proper copyright notice on the card -- which is the case on all the cards I'm using.
I've also consulted with the archivists at the Boston Public Library and the Lake County Discovery Museum -- the official repositories for the Tichnor Brothers and Curt Teich & Co. archives respectively (those were two major postcard companies) and confirmed the public domain status of my cards.
I also got some handy information on how to date the Curt Teich cards -- and I've done some historical research to add a bit of extra interest to my captions.
© billwisserphoto.com / drr.net
My new photographs and/or scans of the cards are, of course, copyrightable, especially considering that I do a lot of Photoshop retouching to clean up the sometimes grimy or worn cards (while leaving some wear visible to keep the antique feeling). Also, for my macro close-ups of the little detail drawings on the map cards, I often retouched out surrounding details to isolate the drawings -- this involved cloning in a lot of half-tone dots!
So, while my underlying original cards are in the public domain, my new interpretations and modifications of the cards I've collected are considered derivative works that are perfectly copyrightable.
© billwisserphoto.com / drr.net
Many of the cards have a lot of charm and some are pretty funny, too."
See these and all of Bill's images in Marketplace.
