Despite the famously uncooperative Irish weather, John Hinde’s postcards of Ireland featured bright sunshine and blue skies, a country seemingly peopled entirely with redheads, happy donkeys carrying turf, and charming cottages that appeared to grow upward from the earth itself. Cars and sweaters were in primary colours, and scarlet rhododendrons sprang up in the unlikeliest of places.

John Hinde had a clear vision: ‘We need to be uplifted rather than depressed. To me pictures should always convey a positive, good feeling, something which makes people happy, which makes them smile, which makes them appreciate some tenderness.’

In these postcards, the world is a sunnier, less complicated and more colourful place. Join Paul Kelly as he returns to John Hinde’s Ireland on a photographic pilgrimage, capturing some places that have changed forever, and some that are just the same.

Throughout Paul Kelly’s childhood, his father, Patrick Kelly, sent John Hinde postcards to him when he was visiting the land of his youth. By the time Paul was nine, he was accompanying his father on these trips, and developed his own love of Ireland. Years later, he set about recapturing the modern-day versions of Hinde’s postcards. Return to Sender, Kelly ’s first collection of his own photographs set against those of John Hinde’s, was a bestseller and a fitting tribute to both his father and to John Hinde’s wonderful work. In Hinde Sight continues that journey.