Print Sales

The John Hinde Butlin’s Collection forms a glorious moment in the story of British photography. Butlin’s holiday camps first opened in 1936 and were conceived as a holiday centre for the great mass of working-class families, becoming a familiar part of British culture and folklore. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the John Hinde Studio produced a series of postcards to be sold at Butlin’s camps throughout the British Isles; it was the job of three photographers, David Noble, Elmar Ludwig and Edmund Nägele to execute the photographs to Hinde’s rigorous formula and standards.  

Each photograph is innovative in its use of colour and elaborately stage-managed, often with large casts of real holidaymakers acting their allocated roles in these narrative tableaux of Butlin’s lounges, ballrooms and bars.  Shot with large format cameras, and lit like a film set, the production of these photographs was an extraordinary undertaking. Now these photographs have been reproduced from the original large format Ektachromes, and prove to be some of the strongest images of their era.