Synopses & Reviews
Our True Intent Is All For Your Delight features the vintage color photographs of the John Hinde postcard company, originally made in the 1970s for sale as postcards and published here in book form for the first time. Butlin's was a network of Holiday Camps that revolutionized the British holiday in the years following World War II and, by the 1970s, was attracting a million people each year. The John Hinde team of photographers documented Butlin's glamorous and kitsch bars and ballrooms with technical brilliance and with the participation of large casts of holidaymakers. Precursors to the art photography of Andreas Gursky and Jeff Wall, these images are simultaneously heart-warming and hilarious, with dazzling design and color. They are a unique social-historical record of Britain in the early 1970s, described by Martin Parr in his introduction as "some of the strongest images of Britain of the period."
Martin Parr is a leading figure in British and European photography and a jackdaw collector of images and -postcards. Born in Epsom, Surrey, in 1952, he spent two summer breaks from college working as a "walkie" photographer at Butlin's, snapping holidaymakers for their family albums. His encounter at Butlin's with John Hinde's postcards helped determine his own style, and he came to fame in 1986 with color-saturated scenes of working-class British holidaymakers, The Last Resort. Author of over 30 photography books, his retrospective was shown at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, in 2002. He is a member of Magnum Photos, and his work has been collected by museums throughout the world, including the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Philadelphia Museum and the Museums of Modern Art in New York and San Francisco.
Review
"Stunningly up-to-the-minute large-format photographs filled with fond ironies...The post card photographers capture the sort of bright, color-saturated period detail you might expect...by turns achingly sincere and unwittingly goofy."
The New Yorker (May 19,2003)
"Just look at the candy-bright hues in John Hinde's delicious collection of vintage postcards of Butlin's...best of all is the romance of the ballroom pictures. Are you dancing? We are."
Hot BooksElle
"Long viewed only as a master of kitsch Hinde is now recognised, albeit posthumously, as a peerless social documentarian. Dazzling in their their colour intensity and strange clarity.... Visionary, Wonderful."
Sean O'Hagan, The Observer, London
"Extraordinary...the combination of aesthetics and promotion produced something that bypasses documentary and approaches an arresting British surrealism".
David Jays, Financial Times
"These phenomenal photographs...a cacophony of colour...Despite and because of their artifice, John Hinde's picture postcards are endlessly fascinating, exposing social trends, sartorial aberrations and a particular photographic vision. A delightful book".
The Art Book (June 2003)
Wonderfully stylizedCheck the prodigious use of Adidas three-stripe! Marvel at the tiki décor blow-out at Butlins Skegness Beachcomber bar! Remark on just how weird pre-Thatcherite Britain really was!
The Face
"Enchanting and surreal"
Vogue Magazine
Synopsis
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, postcard entrepreneur John Hinde produced a series of images of Butlin's popular holiday camps throughout the British Isles. With his trademark use of bright colors and elaborate staging, each photograph featured a large cast of real holidaymakers. These narrative tableaux of Butlin's quiet lounges, ballrooms and bars were rescued from obscurity by dedicated Hinde fan Martin Parr (who introduces the book). Both grand and humble, they are now regarded as some of the strongest images of their era.
John Hinde (1916-1998) was an important pioneer of color photography in Britain. Author of several early color photography books, he was diverted into circus management before founding the traveling John Hinde Show. It failed, and he returned to photography in 1955, conceiving a new kind of postcard--brighter and better than anything produced before. He became the most successful postcard publisher in the world, although critical acclaim only began in 1993 with a retrospective exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Hinde's Butlin's photographs have now been exhibited throughout Europe and America.
About the Author
Born in Epsom, Surrey, in 1952, Martin Parr spent two summer breaks from college working as a walkiephotographer at Butlins, snapping holidaymakers for their family albums. He first came to fame in 1986 with colour saturated scenes of working class British holidaymakers, The Last Resort. Author of over 30 photography books, his retrospective was shown at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, in 2002. John Hinde was an important pioneer of colour photography in Britain and, since the Irish Museum of Modern Art Dublin exhibition in 1993, is becoming recognised as a significant figure in the social history of photography.
His career began in the early 40s London as a photographer and photo-enthusiast, absorbed by the new technology of colour photography and among the first to be published in colour, in early colour magazines and in essays made for the illustrated books Of Cabbages and Kings, Citizens in War, and British Circus Life. While on assignment for the latter, he decided to join ChipperfieldsCircus as its manager. While on tour with Chipperfields, he met his wife, the trapeze artist Jutta. He decided to start his own circus in Ireland: bought a circus tent, hired performers and began to tour. The venture was a disastrous failure.
Without losing his entrepreneurial spirit, he returned to photography having identified a gap in the market for colour, rather than monochrome, postcards of Ireland. He began on his own, issuing his first 6 postcards in 1957, before recruiting a team of photographers, mainly from Germany (because of German photographershigh technical standards). He became one of the most successful postcard publishers in the world.
John Hinde died in 1998, in retirement in the Dordogne, having sold the postcard publishing company in 1972. His archives are part of the Royal Photographic Society collection housed at the National Museum of Photography, Bradford.