Nº 08 — about the shoebox
One box, one wall, and no particular itinerary.
Postmarked is one person, a hand-wound camera and a market-stall shoebox that has been the filing system since 2019. It is not an agency, a media brand or a route to a sponsorship deal. It is a record of places walked slowly, kept because the alternative was letting them go.
the rest of the box Everything on this site came out of a box roughly the size of a pair of boots.
Alongside the prints there are boarding passes, a laminated bus timetable from a village that no longer runs the service, four hotel pencils, a paperclip holding together the receipts from a fortnight in Iceland, and one unlabelled roll of slide film that I have been too superstitious to develop since 2022.
None of it is precious. All of it is evidence. When a field note says the coffee went cold while the light did something, there is usually a stub in the box with the date on it, and that is the only fact-checking this journal has ever had.
Seven years, mostly by accident.
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2019
A cardboard box, and no plan
Came back from six weeks in Portugal with fourteen rolls and nowhere to put the prints. Bought a shoebox from a market stall in Alfama because it was the right size and it is still the box everything lives in.
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2021
The wall started
Ran out of box. Four prints went up on the kitchen wall with washi tape, on the understanding that they would come down at the weekend. They did not come down. There are now sixty-one up there and the tape has gone amber.
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2023
The first letter, sent to nine people
Wrote up the Furka Pass crossing because a friend asked what the fog had actually been like, and it turned into four thousand words. Sent it to nine people. Seven wrote back. That is the entire origin of the seasonal letter.
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2026
Still the same box
Forty rolls a year, four letters, one annual. No sponsors, no affiliate links, no press trips — which is the only reason I can write that a place was disappointing when it was.
Things people write in to ask
Is this a guidebook?
No, and it will make a poor one. There are no opening hours here, no prices, and no recommendations I would stand behind two years later. It is a record of specific mornings, which is a different thing.
Can I use the photographs?
For anything personal — a wall, a card, a school project — yes, and you do not need to ask. For anything commercial, no. Every frame exists as one print and I would rather it stayed that way.
Will you go somewhere on request?
Occasionally, and never for money. The Marrakech section of Volume Two exists because a reader spent a whole email describing a courtyard, and I wanted to see whether it was really like that. It was not. It was better.
Why is everything so brown?
Because it is a photograph of a print, not a scan of a negative. The warm cast is the paper the frame was printed on, lit by a kitchen window. Nothing here has a filter applied after the fact.
saying hello
Every letter gets read and most get answered, though rarely quickly — the box travels and I do not. If you have been somewhere on the wall and remember it differently, that is the email I most want.
Write to me