Postcards from the Holiday

-Elisabetta Masala

Holidays are a modern invention: a suspended moment in time, when we indulge in the illusion of escaping everyday life. Sea, sun, postcards: images that belong to a collective imagination, often stereotyped, which contemporary art has explored with both irony and depth.
British photographer Martin Parr has captured, like few others, the grotesque yet authentic side of mass tourism, portraying crowded beaches, imperfect bodies under the sun, selfies, and small tourist rituals. His images reveal the ambiguity of leisure time: a promise of happiness, but also a mirror of consumer habits and social conventions.
Other artists have turned travel and holidays into a field of inquiry: from critiques of global tourism—often associated with exploitation and the commodification of places—to more intimate reflections on the landscape as an inner space. In this sense, holidays become both an escape and a visual exercise, an opportunity to see the familiar with new eyes.
Now that summer holidays have just ended, returning home offers the chance to revisit those images and memories. Art works in much the same way: it carries us beyond the moment, transforming experience into thought, inviting us to reconsider the myths and illusions woven into our daily lives.