Charles Hutchinson discovers how every postcard tells a story.

ARTIST Tom Phillips has created an alternative National Portrait Gallery in postcard form.

Instead of the grandees and the famous, he turns the focus on the rest of the British nation in the first half of the 20th century: "those that did the work, bore the children, fought the wars - the previously unknown and unsung".

His exhibition, We Are The People - Postcards From The Collection Of Tom Phillips, presents nearly 1,000 portrait photographs as a social document of the British at work and play, in love and in uniform, newly positioned among York Castle Museum's regular exhibits.

In the last century, the postcard portrait transformed the art of portraiture from elite pastime to a popular craze that saw studios spring up in every town and every seaside promenade. "They are historic in the sense that this was the first time people stepped into the light and were seen as individuals rather than the un-pictured masses of previous centuries," says Tom, who has accumulated 50,000 postcards in shoe boxes during 25 years of postcard collecting.

In the course of putting together this exhibition for the National Portrait Gallery and researching his book The Postcard Century, he has looked at two million postcards of anonymous subjects. From this multitude of images of people from every walk of life and every level of society, he has assembled the portraits in themes, which proves doubly useful when placing them in the Castle Museum.

The series of bathing portraits, for example, is on a wall opposite the museum's collection of bathing suits. In the same room, Malcolm Trousdale's footage of Butlins holiday camp at Skegness in 1957 captures the era of knobbly knee and beauty contests as part of the accompanying exhibition of films from the Yorkshire Film Archive, at present being shown on the ITV Yorkshire series The Way We Were.

Some themes are humorous: the extraordinary hairstyles that passed for female fashion; the jollity of charabanc outings; the sheer size of old, unwieldy prams; or the particularly strange predilection for being photographed with potted aspidistra plants.

Phillips talks of people stepping into the light and being seen as individuals in these postcards, but by mounting the exhibition in themes, there is a cumulative effect. "Portrait postcards are rather a neglected type of postcard, the type that people think of as boring, but when you collect them under a title, such as Aspidistras or Two Men, they begin to have a collective impact. When you put together pictures of soldiers, they have a haunted look," he says.

The Two Men series - there is a Two Women series too - is typical of another aspect of the exhibition. As you look, for example, at the hand of a black man resting on the forearm of a white man, you want to know more.

"They all tell a story, they're social history, but you have to make up the narrative. Are those duos friends, lovers, or relatives? I like not knowing and not quite finding out, although you get to recognise gestures in the postcards," says Tom.

Prices are going up. "Portraits were the junk of postcard fairs until my book came along, so I've sort of shot myself in the foot!" he says, but adds he will continue collecting.

He is unrepentant at the expanding number of boxes. "These portraits are a time capsule, you've got them and it's up to you to look after them," he reasons.

Come April 1, Phillips will be at York Racecourse for one of his favourite postcard fairs of the year. "Like every secret hobby, you think no one else does it, but you go to that fair and you can hardly get in," he says. "I don't know when I made that transition from having something to collecting, but they do say it's when you have two of something and go looking for a third."

Updated: 09:28 Saturday, February 12, 2005