It was bad luck with jugglers and chorus girls that drove John Hinde into the postcard business. The photographer behind some of the most enduring images of the Irish landscape, who died aged 81 on December 26th, in France, entered Ireland's budding tourist industry in 1956, after an attempt to stage a travelling variety show had become financially ruinous. By 1972, when he sold his business, he had created not only some of the most celebrated images of post-war Ireland, but an unexpectedly tenacious vision of the country.
Born in Somerset in 1916 to an Irish mother, Hinde spent his early career photographing in (then rare) colour the aftermath of German bombing raids on Britain. After the war, he left the hectic life of a commercial and war photographer to join the circus. But in the mid-1950s, after stints showing films in village halls in the west of Ireland, and one season of his failed touring variety revue, The John Hinde Show, he returned to photography.
Hinde had hatched the idea that there might be a market for touristic "viewcards" of his adopted homeland, typically featuring whitewashed cottages, or red-headed urchins. Holidaymakers, he suggested, send photographs in order to ". . . support their attitude in going to this place. They have to justify their decision to their friends . . . whether or not it's true . . ."
Increasingly, Hinde left the business of taking the photographs for his cards to deputies, albeit a corps of photographers intimate with the requirements of the John Hinde image, and in 1967, he all but retired from photography. When he finally sold John Hinde Ltd, the company had achieved sales of 50 million postcards worldwide.
It was many years later that Hinde's work began to be explored by a generation intrigued with unpicking the notions of Irishness into which they were born. Just as the photographer of quirky Parisian scenes, Eugene Atget, had been adopted by the Surrealists for reasons unconnected to his own idea of his work, Hinde found himself championed in unexpected quarters. It was with good reason that an exhibition of his work at IMMA in 1993 was called Hindesight. Most of what suddenly made the photographer's work interesting and attractive must have been invisible to the original purchasers of his images.
In similar fashion, Hinde never seemed particularly concerned with complicated notions of the truth of his images. He and his photographers were happy to pump up the colours of a scene, plant appealing flora in shot, remove extraneous details, rope in passers-by to pose and even, on one notorious occasion, force an Aran fisherman to wear the "appropriate" knitwear before he could have his photograph taken. Such contrivances were hardly unprecedented. One of Hinde's photographers on the Aran trip recalls that he took a photograph of a "perfect" Irish cottage, only to discover that it had been built by Robert Flaherty for the filming of Man Of Aran.
In recent years, Hinde's work has provided a substrate for several artists interested in questions of identity and representation. Ten extra lines are to come for this par, to be provided by Luke on Monday. (then rare) colour the aftermath of (then rare) colour the aftermath of (then rare) colour the (then rare) colour the aftermath of (then rare) colour the aftermath of (then rare) colour the aftermath of (then rare) colour the aftermath of (then rare) colour the aftermath of. Perhaps the most extravagant response comes in the work of Sean Hillen, which has frequently involved using scalpel and glue on Hinde's postcards to reconstruct fantasy images from the already carefully constructed landscapes. Super-enlarged versions of these images, part of a series called Irelantis, flanked the Liffey this autumn as part of Temple Bar's Street Art project. Even if Hinde's approach seems dangerously susceptible to parody, his way of seeing Ireland clearly maintains a certain worldwide appeal. His well-known image of O'Connell Street. seen from south of the bridge, for example, is echoed in the "Live View on Dublin" snap that now draws so many nostalgic ex-Dubliners to a certain newspaper's Web pages. Except, of course, that someone has deconstructed the pillar.
