Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Our True Intent Is All For Your Delight features the vintage color photographs of the John Hinde postcard company, originally made in the 1970s for sale as postcards and published here in book form for the first time.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.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

For more than 45 years, British working-class families on holiday enjoyed the affordable leisure tradition of Butlin's Holiday Camps. As a photographic portrait of post-World War II British life, this book features color images that first appeared as vacation postcards from these resorts. The book's title, taken from the photo of a glowing neon sign, aptly conveys the Butlin's philosophy. The photographs in the book, made by the John Hinde Studio in Dublin to be sold at the camps, are virtual time capsules of three decades. Hinde was a color photography pioneer, but what is most interesting about these Technicolor images is not the elaborate staging or the theatrical lighting but the fact that these ballrooms and lounges are filled with "real" people, not models. This book is the first to compile and reproduce the Hinde Studio images. Essays by photographers who worked for Hinde give insight into his methods, and the lucid introduction by contemporary photographer Martin Parr explains why these humble postcards are important, both historically and theoretically. Recommended for art photography collections in large public and academic libraries.-Shauna Frischkorn, Millersville Univ., PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

John Hinde (see subtitle) was a commercial photographer who specialized in color images for postcards. The Butlin of the subtitle was Billy Butlin, who had a chain of "holiday centres" in Britain that were intended to provide "the jollity and comradeship of a camping holiday, plus all the amenities of a first-class hotel" to ordinary British families. (The book's title--a line of Shakespeare's--was Butlin's business slogan.) Elmar Ludwig, Edmund Nagele, and David Noble were photographers whom Hinde assigned to capture the function rooms, playgrounds, and concessions of Butlin's centers in use by actual customers. Here, 55 of the resulting brilliant, evenly lighted frames are mounted on footwide pages, and their artistic and historical merits are maximized. They show the leisure of mainstream Britons in the centers' heyday, the "swinging" '60s and '70s, resplendently; and their technical brio is the prime topic of Martin Parr's introduction and the three photographers' appended testimonies. Anglophiles and photography buffs should rejoice in the book, but the crowded-room fascination of the pictures should enthrall plenty of nonspecialists, too. --Ray Olson