“I am not sure whether my father totally understood my fascination with his photographs of package holidays,” explains artist Jake Clark, whose obsession with seaside resort architecture has been informed by his childhood growing up in the burgeoning package holiday paradise of 1970s Mallorca.
Jake’s father, Trevor Clark, worked as a travel and advertising photographer on the Balearic island from the 1960s until the 1990s. Riding on the wave of a contemporary gold rush, Clark captured real tourists in the midst of their summer frivolities for use in brochures back home in Blighty, where plummeting air travel prices were quickly whisking buckets and spades from resorts like Margate or Rhyl over to Spain and its increasingly ‘liberal’ dictatorship.
Occasionally helping on shoots, in between partying in Magaluf as a teenager, Trevor’s practice rubbed off on his son, which led to him studying photography, and later pursuing painting in university. As much as Jake would be entering the world of studious art scholars, the decadent appeal of the package holiday revolution was difficult to escape, and around this time, in the early 1990s, Clark Jr. would discover this dad’s archive, and begin spending hours poring over thousands of transparencies that had been shot for British holiday brochures.
That archive is now available to all, by way of Hoxton Mini Press’s latest in their Vintage Britain series; The Package Holiday: 1968–1985 a 120-page technicolour waltz through the wonderland of the early years in a revolution that would transform an abundance of Southern Europe over the decades to come. Concrete palaces built to house pasty tourists craving local delicacies like steak and chips, postcards and poolside activities, terrazzo bars and evening entertainment, Trevor Clark’s photography offers an innocent gaze into the beginning of a movement that would transform travel forever.
“For me,” Jake continues of his father’s photographs, “they act as a link to my childhood in Mallorca – my brother and I are in some of them, posing around a pool or on a beach. Trevor died in 2018 and these images mean a lot to me. They are a way of connecting with him, both as his son and as an artist. This is the first time that this extensive archive of images has been published.”
Compiled by Jake and led by a foreword from architectural journalist, Jan-Carlos Kucharek, The Package Holiday: 1968–1985 is available now from Hoxton Mini Press for £18.95, with a special edition of limited-edition 15 cm x 15 cm prints together with a signed copy of the book from £50.
The Package Holiday 1968-1985 Photography, Trevor Clark.
