North from Pima Point, Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona c. 1928

This printed postcard shows the view North from Pima Point, Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona. The anonymous maker of this postcard used a fairly muted colour palette of browns, pinks, greys and blues to create an image which is topographical but also evocative. There's a slightly dreamy quality to the haze across the Canyon, and it's interesting to consider how the physical reality of the landscape becomes flattened and compressed when it is rendered into a printed image. What is lost, and what is gained in this process? Take the diagonal shadows cast by the peaks in the foreground for example. They give a sense of depth and scale, and yet there is also a tension between the flat surface of the postcard and the illusion of three-dimensional space. Painters like David Hockney, who has also painted the Grand Canyon, embrace this tension, but here the artist is attempting to create a realistic representation of space. Ultimately, like all art, this piece asks us to think about the complex relationship between reality and representation.