Citizens

in Colour: The Wartime Photography of John Hinde and Percy

Hennell

In the early 1940s, as Britain mobilized its population for the Second World
War, photographers were called upon to play their part on the home front.
Colour photography, with its vividness and immediacy, emerged from the
spheres of business, commerce and advertising to become a vital tool in the
boosting of British morale. Though the photo spreads which appeared in
popular mass-circulation magazines such as Picture Post were always
monochrome, a new kind of photo story, made in colour, highly styled and
arranged, emerged in a series of books produced for major British
publishers by the company Adprint. . The photographers John Hinde and
Percy Hennell, both whom had worked in industry in the 1930s, became
major figures in a revolutionary practice, documenting the British on the
home front in ways which used all their skills in advertising and
commercial photography.

The colour documentary produced during WW2 by photographers whose

work involved creating a highly styled documentary realism focused on
the idea of an idealized, highly cohesive citizenry, with few class or cultural
boundaries. The emphasis was upon work and community as British
society re-formed itself in the face of a common enemy. The real Britain
may still have had its roots in a carefully delineated class system, slums still
existed alongside stately homes, but through the meticulously crafted and
imagined photographs of Hennell and Hinde, another brightly coloured
Britain emerged.