Photographer John Hinde And His Fabulous Colourful Postcards From The Past

The photographer Martin Parr once described the postcards of John Hinde as “some of the strongest images of Britain in the 1960s and 1970s”. Parr noted that Hinde was: “fastidious about the colour, the saturation, the technique, and that paid off.”

John Wilfrid Hinde who had been born in Somerset in 1916 trained at the Reimann School of Photography and then setup a studio in London working as a documentary, war and advertising photographer. He produced some stunning pictures during WW2 including a notable close-up of a Fire Warden in 1944, the year after he had been made a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society.

h/t: flashbak

Fire Warden, 1944

After the war John Hinde got a job managing and publicising several circuses in Ireland and then decided to set up his own called the John Hinde Show along with his wife-to-be Antoina Falnoga, a trapeze artist.

Hinde’s postcards were immensely popular, despite Hinde’s view that his photographs held no artistic value.

Since his death in 1998, exhibits of his photography have travelled all over the world and he proved to be the most successful postcard producer in the world.