Hindesight

THERE WAS never a dull day in the world of John Hinde. Comely maidens, bog-trotting donkeys, thatch cottages and flame-haired youths featuring in postcards so gloriously artificial in hue as to make your eyes water, transcendent of mere terrestrial reality. Here too, were sunsets so lurid from Colwyn Bay to Bermuda that their likes haven't graced this realm since Hiroshima.

For many, a by-word for bad taste and the scourge of this nation's public image, John Hinde possessed an almost evangelical zeal for colour photography and its potential to improve us. Hinde spoke of a "sort of vision thing . . . of fantastic colour photographs that I had never seen and that nobody else had ever seen and my whole aim was all the time how to get there, how to achieve it. You ever visualise heaven?" he asks.

The Empress Ballroom, Skegness? The Lounge at Butlins, Bognor Regis? They're all here, and in glorious technicolour. Delight, if you will, in the dozing geriatrics, and the young generation in its mini-skirts, thigh-length boots, bee-hives and other hair-raising fashion errors of the era.

Fortunately for Hinde his work coincided with a time that identified the use of vivid colours with a sense of progress, of optimism, and his cards outsold all others. Beginning in 1957 with a range of six monster-sized cards catering to transatlantic arrivals at Shannon that included the now classic 'Jaunting Car' image, immortalised on the sleeve of The Undertones pop gem 'Here Comes The Summer', and less memorable scenes such as "Shannon Free Airport and Industrial Estate", John Hinde was selling 50 million worldwide by the time he sold the company in 1972 and retired to live out his days in wealthy obscurity in the South of France.

That is until the critic David Lee set about the process of Hinde's critical rehabilitation with a book and retrospective exhibition opening appropriately at IMMA and moving on to Derry, the UK and eventually America.

Anticipating outrage over the trespass of such notorious kitsch into the hallowed halls of the museum, Director Declan McGonagle is at pains to stress the contemporary relevance of Hinde's work. In a country with so many artists dealing with the landscape and issues of identity, Hinde's images could hardly have failed to leave a legacy in the artistic consciousness. Complete with anecdotal evidence of scene manipulation (Aran sweaterless Aran fisherman, instant important flora and many more contrivances besides) the show aims to educate as well as entertain.

• Blaise Drummond