The above picture is taken from the book ‘Our True Intent Is All For Your Delight’. This book is comprised of photographs taken in the 1960s and 1970s by John Hinde and a team of photographers. The photographs were taken at Butlins holiday camps around the UK to be used as promotional materials. Despite the fact that they were only intended to be printed at the size of postcards, the production values were quite exceptional. Meticulously lit and shot on large format cameras, they were extremely high quality images. John Hinde was the photographer hired originally for the task and he found himself with so much work that he had to hire a team of 3 photographers to shoot the actual images. He retained creative control of the photographs and is reported to have been very meticulous and particular about the photographs his team took. Edmund Nägele was one of these photographers and he said the following:

“John Hinde was not a man of many words though he had a good and precise idea of what his finished postcards should look like. He would sit at the light-table, looking at and scrutinising our work in silence, umming and arring though, I soon realised, this umming and arring was equivalent to the purring of a happy cat. If the purring stopped, you started to worry. Why, he might ask, didn’t or did you do this or that… “

Whilst these photographs may look candid (and that is the intention) they were actually meticulously posed and arranged using actual holidaymakers. Each element is tightly controlled to project the most idealised view of the holiday camp possible. It’s easy to see why Hinde and his team were in such demand for their work, the photographs convey so much of the atmosphere of a perfect holiday. The over-saturated colours are almost surreal, too perfect to be true.

It may appear on the surface that these photographs are ‘just’ postcard pictures, with no great significance in terms of art or social purpose; but these photographs, staged though they may be, are a valuable document of a particular time and place, a place that existed regardless of how it’s inhabitants were choreographed for the camera. It is also a record of the way we spent our holidays in that period, before commercial flights were cheap enough to become everyday.

Martin Parr wrote the introduction to the book as well as curating an exhibition of this work in 2003. He was introduced to it in the early 1970s when he worked in a Butlins resort as a photographer. He has been a vocal supporter of these photographs ever since and was a key figure in introducing them to a wider audience. It is easy to draw comparisons between these photographs and those of Parr himself, particularly in terms of their aesthetic qualities.

If you would like to read more about this work, there is a really interesting piece of writing by Edmund Nägele about his time producing photographs for Hinde, here

Your thoughts are welcome in the comments!

I’m a member of the photographic collective, west and our debut exhibition opens on the 2nd July at the Light House Media Centre in Wolverhampton. Our intention as a group is to come together and exhibit on a twice-yearly basis. Our individual interests as photographers are very diverse and this creates a dynamic group aesthetic.

(photograph from my ‘Lapsed Memories’ project. Featured on degree show website)

It’s probably about time I let you know a little more about me and my practice as a photographer. I have a personal website at www.jomorgan.co.uk but it’s been a very long time since it was last updated, although it has a lot of my uni work from about 2 years up there if you have any desire to check that out. I recommend you view it in Firefox, it looks a bit odd in Internet Explorer (I haven’t checked it out in Safari or Chrome or any other browser)

My interests lie in the link between photography and memory, which is obviously a vast subject area but I am concerned with a few aspects in particular. One of which is the ability of the camera to capture a particular moment accurately, and how true it is to how you experienced the moment it represents. Similarly, I am interested in the way a photograph can influence your recollection of an event. Often an old photograph can make you question your own memory of that time and can alter how you recall it in the future. This is often the kind of image used in photo therapy, a subject I wrote my dissertation on and one I will certainly visit in a future post on this blog. Thirdly, I am fascinated with how we use photography to collect and archive our memories. Ever since I can remember my family and I’m sure other people’s families have taken cameras out to special events and carefully filed the resulting photographs away in albums. With the rise of digital photography, this archiving tends to take place online but the principle is the same.

A selection of photographs from The Forgotten Negatives Project will be displayed at our exhibition at the Light House and if you’re in the Wolverhampton/West Midlands area any time in July I’d love for you to pop along and have a look. It opens on Friday 2nd July and there will be a private viewing 6-9pm on that day and it the exhibition will remain open until 29th July.

I adore the aesthetic qualities of black and white film. I find that there is so much more drama and atmosphere than you find in a lot of colour photography. At least, I think it is easier to produce that feeling with black and white film. The use of flash produces quite a different effect too. With colour film, the flash (especially on a disposable camera) can look very harsh and I personally avoid it as far as I can with colour photography. However, black and white film shot with flash tends to produce photographs with a lot of contrast and sharp, dark shadows: very atmospheric!

Here are my favourites from this film, the rest of them can be found on Flickr

This is an example of a photograph that has been transformed by the flash. The man is obviously meant to be the subject of the image but my eye is drawn repeatedly to the glass and dish on the table. The flash has lit them alone and left the rest of the frame in relative darkness. The glass and dish immediately reminded me of the photograph ‘La Fourchette’ by Andre Kertesz, a hungarian photographer whose work I adore for it’s aesthetic quality. I highly recommend picking up one of his books for pure visual indulgence.

The depth of field in this shot is what made it catch my eye. Everything from the boat at the front to the waves all the way to the horizon is crisp. A wide depth of field is common in photographs taken with a disposable camera (more or less, if your subject is 4′ or more away, it’ll be in focus) but the level of detail, all the way to the mountains on the horizon, in this shot is quite exceptional. The exposure is excellent, rare in a camera with fixed shutter speed/ISO/aperture.

This photograph is more of the typical candid snapshot style than the others. I can’t decide whether I think this photograph was truly candid, or whether the subjects knew they were being photographed. The man looks like he is actively avoiding the camera but in other shots on the film he seems happy to be photographed. My overall impression is that it is a candid moment but it’s certainly open to interpretation.

This is one of those films that I wish I had just a little more detail about. The first 13 and the last 9 images all look to have been taken in the same place at the same time, containing all of the same people. But the shots in the middle are of a scuba-diving trip. I find it hard to piece together a narrative or story for this film. I’d love to hear any ideas or opinions in the comments!

I just thought it seemed like an appropriate time to repost the location of the Facebook group and Twitter account for the project. These are the first places to know when new posts go up!

Thanks for stopping by!