This week's news of the death in southern France of an elderly Englishman will have evoked, for many people, nostalgic images from the 1950s and 1960s. For the photographer and postcard manufacturer John Hinde, whose name became synonymous with prettified views of the Irish landscape and people, not only influenced the perception of Ireland by tourists, but affected the way Irish people saw their own country and themselves. Hinde's Ireland - a place of blue skies, sunshine, red-haired colleens, beachballs on the strand, donkeys and thatched cottages - was a kind of garish version of Eamon de Valera's land "bright with cosy homesteads", the Ireland that remained essentially unchanged between Independence and the start of the 1960s. He once said that his "viewcards" - which at one stage were selling at the rate of 50,000 a year - were "at least as important as anything that Bord Failte did" in promoting tourism; and his claim was arguably justified. His pictures of thatched cottages held a particular appeal for Irish-Americans, many of whose forebears had been forced to quit - or had fled from - just such little homes in the West.
Ironically, Hinde's postcards achieved their greatest popularity at a time when the Ireland they idealised was disappearing, thanks to the modernisation programme of Sean Lemass and the influences of international mass culture. Aspects of the new Ireland were captured in postcards of Dublin Airport (complete with smiling air hostess), a bustling O'Connell Street (complete with Nelson's Pillar) and a "medieval" banquet at Bunratty - suggestive both of olde-world charm and of the newer, more sophisticated approach to tourism.
Hinde never denied that he doctored his pictures. "Tourists ask for certain things," he said. ". . . if you photographed a beautiful scene off the west coast of Ireland, it would come out as practically monochrome, so we set out to create the impression you thought you'd had." It is easy to scoff at the seeming naivety and sentimentality of his images and to dismiss them as unreal. But are Hinde's views of Connemara any less "real" than those of, say, Paul Henry (though Henry aspired to a higher reality, that of art)? In any case, aesthetic discussion of Hinde's work is probably irrelevant; what matters is that he undeniably helped to shape popular perceptions of this country. This fact (as well as his pictures' appeal as kitsch) was recognised in 1993 by an exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
Looking now at some of Hinde's views, it is hard not to regret the loss of a certain freshness and innocence that seems to underlie their lurid colours. But with today's perspective one thinks also of the darker side of that Ireland: the Ireland of censorship, poverty, religious obscurantism, guilty sexual obsession, grim orphanages, cruel schools. Today's Ireland is, in the main, a better place. It too has its stereotypes: Riverdance, Temple Bar, luxury golf-courses, the Celtic Tiger, rather than donkeys and cottages. But, just as in John Hinde's day, the bright images we show the world - and ourselves - conceal too much poverty and pain.