Topham, with Picturepoint, has six million pictures dating from medieval manuscripts to today’s digital files and can meet many difficult picture requests. It was founded in 1975, when Alan and Joanna Smith bought the Topham archive of 120,000 pictures. The photographer John Topham was working as a policeman in the East End of London when he sold a picture to the Daily Mirror for 5 guineas – a fortnight’s wage! – and decided to become a professional. He devoted the rest of his life to photographing daily life in the countryside and suburbs of south-east England. His most famous picture is of hop-pickers’ children sheltering in a trench in 1940, while the Battle of Britain raged overhead. This picture flashed around the world and when published in Life Magazine was widely credited with changing American attitudes and helping to bring the USA into the war.
The new owners were trained as historians, not photographers, and used their new resource to write books around the pictures. An early work, Memory Lane, a record of the way we were, became a best seller, much used by set designers at the BBC. Other books were We’ll Meet Again, Edwardian Children, The Day Before Yesterday, Yesterday, Those Were The Days, Village Cooking, Farm Your Garden and the 1979 winner of the André Simon prize for the best wine book of the year, The New English Vineyard. Perhaps because of their historical interest, the Smiths were agonised by the destruction of so much of the photographic heritage. It was a time when nobody wanted pictures, when Francis Frith negatives were used for cloches in the factory garden and when the sound of breaking plate glass negatives could be heard at night in Fleet Street. There was ample storage space at the Smiths’ Victorian vicarage in rural Kent, where a rescue collection seemed to arrive every month. At one time there were a hundred filing cabinets under canvas on the lawn, whilst the contents were sorted.
First to arrive was most of the library that had been built around Illustrated Magazine, started in 1936 by Staffan Lorant before he started Picture Post, and numerous women’s magazines.
The next huge arrival was the UPI (London) negative collection. U stood for Universal, P for Planet News and I for International News Photos. The span was 1932 to 1970. Planet News is particularly interesting for its coverage of 1930’s Soviet trials, the Spanish Civil War, the USA and England’s social life.
By 1980 the collection numbered many millions, but the incoming tide was unstoppable. Other arrivals included a large part of the Press Association negative library 1945-1960, outstanding for its record of daily life. The Library has continued a long relationship with both the Press Association and Associated Press.
Next came the early negatives of Pictorial Press, started by Tom Blau before he founded Camera Press. It contains outstanding photography, including work by Karsh, Ken Russell and other young meteors, and the subject matter is of great interest covering everything from world famous musicians, composers, conductors and ballet stars to Ken Russell’s brilliant reportage on Teddy boys and girls from the 1950s.
The last of the really big analogue collections to arrive was Picturepoint in 1994. Picturepoint was, and is, one of the big players in travel and topography.
Topham early embraced new technologies – it was the first UK picture library to use a fax – and it was one of the first to realise that computer cataloguing meant that collections could be accessed at a single point of reference, which avoided the necessity of integrating files physically. It sounds so obvious now, but it was not widely grasped fifteen years ago. Work started in earnest in 1992 and there are eight million records on the Topham database today.
Topham added to its already huge files sets of the classic illustrated magazines, Illustrated London News (the first hundred years is now indexed), L’Illustration, Punch, Life, Assiette au Beurre, Signal, etc., etc. Online demand was voracious but digitisation of the images progressed steadily and slowly. The answer to the machine has been provided by the machine. Topham’s core 150,000 digital picture base is now part of TopFoto.co.uk, a six terabyte fibre optic web site which is now the home to many firms who use the site to host their own websites for the convenience of their own customers and whose collections are also seamlessly integrated with a site of 1.2 million pictures.
Like an angler, Alan Smith still mourns the big ones that got away. But perhaps it is just as well that Topham failed to acquire the BBC Hulton Picture Library and the two gigantic Express Group libraries. Its bid, if accepted, would have necessitated the removal of 300 filing cabinets within 24 hours before the Evening Standard building was knocked down.
Today the problems are not so much photography as technology – how to beat the dreaded vinegar syndrome which is destroying 1945+ negatives which were previously thought safe from decay, how to work with many production agencies receiving their pictures on a 24 hour basis, to provide 24 hour access both to agents throughout the world and to publishers in the UK, and to provide opportunity for TopFoto’s skilled staff to research creatively whilst providing a scan-on-demand service for customers.
