"Our True Intent Is All for Your Delight" at Janet Borden - New York

Founded in 1936 by entrepreneur Billy Butlin, Butlin's Holiday Camps were designed to provide affordable vacations for England's working-class families. The camps flourished in the postwar years, and in the mid-1960s, Butlin sought out the John Hinde Studio, a postcard company known for its cheery views of Ireland, to produce promotional postcards for him. Hinde, in turn, hired two Germans, Elmar Ludwig and Edmund Nagele, and a Brit, David Noble, to take most of the photographs. They created stagy, brightly colored pictures showing the British working class at leisure.

These images were destined to appeal to a collector of kitschy cultural artifacts like British photographer Martin Parr. Himself a photographer at Butlin's camps in the early '70s, Parr collected postcards of Butlin's from the John Hinde Studio. For this show, he presented 16 large-format photographs (most measuring 20 by 24 inches) that he reprinted from Hinde's original 4-by-5inch negatives. (A book of these Butlin's images, also reprinted from the original 4-by-5s, has been brought out by London art-book publisher Chris Boot.)

This project follows Parr's "Boring Postcards," a collection (and three-volume publication) he made of postcards of often utterly unremarkable subjects, such as insignificant local sites or ordinary vacation spots. Like those images, the Butlin's pictures can be unintentionally goofy. There is a shot of waitresses in grass skirts serving lager and one of the "French Bar" at a Butlin's camp where, judging from the bottles of Guinness, Bass and Whitebread on view, nothing but British and Irish beer is imbibed by the extremely dour-looking crowd. Other photos show such scenes as middle-aged couples waltzing in a Regency ballroom; vacationers relaxing in "a quiet lounge" (as one picture is titled); and a long, carpeted hall that looks like an overcrowded airport terminal. Blown up far beyond their original scale, these images look oddly contemporary, with the staged feel of a Gregory Crewdson; they were, in fact, highly choreographed, as well as carefully composed.

Hinde's pictures depict a regimentedly cheerful, at-your-service kind of place with the constant entertainments of a cruise ship. It seems appropriate that Butlin borrowed his firm's slogan, "Our True Intent Is All for Your Delight," from the front of a fairground organ, reportedly not realizing it came from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. In Butlinland Skegness, Night Scene, fluorescent lights declaim the phrase across the front of a building, drenching the whole scene in an almost eerie, incandescent pink.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group