Our True Intent Is All For Your Delight: The John Hinde Butlin's Photographs - Hardcover

Martin Parr

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1905712200 ISBN 13: 9781905712205

Publisher: Chris Boot, 2011

Synopsis

The John Hinde Butlin’s photographs are a glorious moment in the story of British photography. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the John Hinde Studio, based in Dublin, produced a series of postcards to be sold at Butlin’s holiday camps throughout the British Isles. Famous for their hi-de-hi catchphrase, redcoat hosts, and bargain packages with all entertainment included, this was Butlin’s heyday. Throughout the 1970s, over a million Britons had a holiday at Butlin’s each year. With innovative use of colour and elaborate staging (the trademarks of a John Hinde postcard), it was the challenging job of two German (Elmar Ludwig and Edmund Nägele) and one British photographer (David Noble) to execute the photographs to Hinde’s rigorous formula and standards. Each photograph is elaborately stage managed, with often large casts of real holidaymakers acting their allocated roles in these narrative tableaux of the Butlin’s quiet lounges, ballrooms and Beachomber bars. Shot with large format cameras, and lit like a film set, the production of these photographs were an extraordinary undertaking. The images helped John Hinde become one of the most successful postcard publishers in the world. Most of the John Hinde Butlin’s photographs have only ever been published as postcards. The book and exhibition photographs are reproduced from the original large format Ektachromes. They prove to be some of the strongest images of their era.

About this title

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 Books' Elle

"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 stylized...Check the prodigious use of Adidas three-stripe! Marvel at the tiki dicor blow-out at Butlin's Skegness Beachcomber bar! Remark on just how weird pre-Thatcherite Britain really was!"
The Face

"Enchanting and surreal"

Vogue Magazine

About the Author:

Martin Parr

A leading and influential figure in British photography, Martin Parr was born in Epsom, Surrey, in 1952. He established his reputation with the publication of photographs of New Brighton Beach, near Liverpool, The Last Resort. A jackdaw collector of postcards and books, as well as a prolific image-maker, Parr’s own recent books include the Boring Postcards series, Common Sense, Think of England and Autoportraits. His Collected Works retrospective was shown at the Barbican Art Gallery in 2002. Parr lives in Bristol and is a member of Magnum Photos.

John Hinde

A pioneer of colour photography in Britain, John Hinde was born in 1916 in Street, Somerset, the grandson of James Clark (founder of Clark’s Shoes). His career began in the early 1940s as a photographer and an innovator in colour reproduction techniques. He was among the first photographers in Britain to be published by the new colour magazines, and made photoessays for the illustrated books Of Cabbages and Kings, Citizens in War, and British Circus Life, among many others. He began the John Hinde Studio in Ireland in 1956, going on to become one of the most successful postcard publishers in the world with 50 million annual postcard sales. He sold the company in 1972 and concentrated subsequently on landscape painting. His work was recognised with a retrospective at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, in 1993. Hinde died in retirement in the Dordogne, France, in 1998.

The John Hinde Photographers:

Elmar Ludwig: Born in Halle, in East Germany in 1935, Ludwig began his apprenticeship in advertising photography, aged 16, working with studios in Munich and Cologne prior to being recruited by John Hinde in 1962. He spent a total of nine years as a postcard photographer with Hinde before establishing a successful advertising studio of his own in Munich. Now semi-retired, he mixes regular assignments for a sportswear catalogue with skiing, mountaineering and work as a hospice volunteer.

Edmund Nägele F.R.P.S.: Edmund Nägele was born in Germany. After working in an advertising studio in Munich, he joined the John Hinde Studio in 1965. He became freelance in 1972, travelling and photographing around the world before settling in Cheltenham, England, in 1982 where he has established the successful stock photography company, nagelestock.com. He was awarded a Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society in 1973.

David Noble: Born in Folkestone, England, Noble’s early career included work for local commercial and portrait photographers, the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald and freelance photography for trade magazines. A developing interest in landscape photographs led him to John Hinde in 1969, for whom he made postcard photographs in East Asia, the USA, the Mediterranean as well as Ireland and Britain. After leaving John Hinde Ltd in 1988, he established a successful stock landscape and travel photography collection, David Noble Photography, which he runs with his wife Jenny in Folkestone.

About this edition

• Publisher: Chris Boot
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1905712200
• ISBN 13: 9781905712205
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128