Langweilige postkarten

160 daringly dull postcards of Germany from the 50s to the 80s.

Magnum photographer Martin Parr is a key figure in the world of photography and contemporary art.

He has been an avid postcard collector for twenty years.

In the final instalment of the Boring Postcards trilogy, he presents the pride of his boring collection: 160 postcards from Germany.

Using the same approach as the two previous Boring Postcards (which featured postcards from the UK and the USA), this new book takes you on a daringly dull tour of the autobahns, airports, hotels, factories, shops, border posts, tower blocks and new towns of Germany.

All the cards were made before German reunification, and provide fascinating and hilarious insights into German social and architectural values between the 1950s and 1980s.

The two nations' special relationship with concrete and the functional modernist block is nostalgically and repetitiously celebrated in postcard after postcard, and the volume provides a revealing context for consideration of the work of contemporary German art and landscape photographers. For a postcard to qualify as sufficiently boring to be included, either its composition, its content, or the characters featured, must be arguably boring or the photograph must be absent of anything which might be described as interesting.

Boring Postcards Germany is the crowning glory of the trilogy, the most outrageous and the most boring book of them all. (All of the text for the book will be in German, including the title on the front cover.

There will be a belly band, however, giving the English title, Boring Postcards Germany.)