Sunday Stamps: Photography

Today's Sunday Stamps theme is 'Photography'.

Photos are used often on stamps, but photography as an art in itself seems to be rarely used in the tiny traveling postage pictures.
Fortunately I found stamps dedicated to three Dutch photographers. Who, by the way, have been traveling all-over the world to take their pictures.

Charlotte Dumas (Vlaardingen, 1977) is one of my favourite Dutch photographers, because of her photos of animals, portrayed in a personal way. I had never heard of her, neither seen her work, until PostNL issued this stamp sheet of 'animals with a story' in 2015. In the selvages you can find the names of the animals, and read some more info (in Dutch).



In 2014 the five 'children's welfare stamps' ('Kinderpostzegels') stamp sheet shows pieces of art, depicting children. The artwork is part of the collection of the Rijksmuseum (the National Museum). Four stamps show paintings, and the fifth one, twice as much larger than the other four, show this photo:



The photographer is Maya Pejić (The Hague, 1935). The boy pictured is making some amazing manoeuvre on his skateboard in the Vondelpark in Amsterdam.
Some more information (in Dutch) about the photographer you can find on the website of the IISG (International Institute of Social History), and many more pictures you can find via google.

An other stamp sheet, completely dedicated to a photographer, is this sheet, issued last year in honour of Ed van der Elsken (Amsterdam, 1926 - Edam, 1990).
Personally I wasn't that interested in these stamps, due to the photos and the tiny size of these, but reading something more about the background (alas in Dutch only ,too) they became interesting for me though.




See more stamps on the theme 'photography' on today's Sunday Stamps blog and via the links mentioned there.

Sunday stamps: Mammals

Het thema van deze Sunday stamps is 'zoogdieren'. Het liefst zou ik postzegels willen laten zien van onszelf, de mens is per slot van rekening een zoogdier, maar helaas heb ik er geen in mijn collectie. 'Helaas', want het blijft scheef dat voor flesvoedingsfabrikanten ongebreideld reclame wordt gemaakt: op geboorte- en felicitatiekaartjes zie je volop melkflesjes, maar vrijwel nooit een kind aan de borst. Met als gevolg, zo is mijn en anderen hun ervaring, dat veel pasgeboren moeders niet gemakkelijk buitenshuis borstvoeding durven geven, en vaak ook zelfs thuis niet als er anderen bij zijn. Er heerst blijkbaar toch een soort taboe op, en door die onzichtbaarheid vergeten mensen dat borstvoeding gewoon normaal is...
In Nederland zijn niet eens officiële postzegels over 't onderwerp uitgegeven, in tegenstelling tot bijvoorbeeld Luxemburg, Polen (met een voorloper hier), San Marino (ook minstens twee keer, zie hier en hier), Oeganda, Algerije, Guatemala, Griekenland en Nicaragua.

Dus vandaag maar een ander zoogdier op postzegel, een van mijn meest favoriete: het vogelbekdier. Een zoogdier, dat zwemt en eieren legt!
Deze Australische postzegel stond al heel lang op mijn verlanglijstje, dus ik was heel blij toen ik 'm ontving. En sprong een gat in de lucht toen onderstaande envelop in de bus kwam, met nog meer vogelbekdierzegels!

This time the Sunday Stamps theme is 'Mammals'. I'd prefer to show stamps of ourselves: we human beings are mammals, too. The word 'mammal' comes from the Latin word 'mamma' which means 'breast', and the Dutch word for mammal, 'zoogdier', means 'breastfeeding animal'.
But alas I don't have any stamp of breastfeeding people. 'Alas', because I think it unfair that there is a lot of implicit advertisement for the formula industry: on birth- and congratulations cards for newborn children and parents there are a lot of bottles to see, while I hardly see similar cards showing a baby being nursed. To my and other's experience, many newborn mothers feel uneasy when nursing outside home, or even at home in front of friends or relatives. And by the fact that 'breastfeeding' seems to be banned from public views, it has become a kind of taboo. Despite of the fact that mother's milk is the normal feeding for a child, by this invisibility many people forget that...
Here in the Netherlands there never have been issued official stamps showing breastfeeding, while in other countries there are beautiful stamps on the subject, for instance Luxembourg, Poland (previously this one), San Marino (also at least twice; see here and here), Uganda, Algeria, Guatemala, Greece and Nicaragua.

So for today I choose an other mammal, one of my all-time favourites: the Platypus. This nursing hairy animal lays eggs! This postage stamp was on my wish list for a very long time, so you can imagine how happy I was when I received the stamp above from Australia. And I 'jumped a hole in the air' (Dutch expression) when I received the mail you see below, with even more Platypus stamps!