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

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, Butlin's annually hosted over a million holidaying Britons throughout the 1970s. 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. With innovative use of color and elaborate staging (the trademarks of a John Hinde postcard), each photograph is painstakingly produced, with often large casts of real holidaymakers acting their allocated roles in these narrative tableaux of the Butlin's quiet lounges, ballrooms and Beachcomber bars. Shot with large-format cameras and lit like a film set, these photographs were an extraordinary undertaking in their production values, and 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. This new affordable edition of Our True Intent Is All For Your Delight, first published to critical acclaim and popular success in 2002, is published to mark the 75th anniversary of Butlins.

"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