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0268730 - The National Trust Village of Chiddingstone, Kent,
24 January 1958 ©John Topham / TopFoto

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Founded by Leopold Ullstein in 1877 ullstein bild rapidly established itself as the leading publisher in Germany of newspapers and magazines such as Berliner Illustrirte. Included in the 10000 employees were many outstanding Weimar Republic photographers whose work suvived intact the perils of war.

The company broke up during the political turmoil of WWII but during the 1950s ullstein bild reasserted its position as a leading picture agency and was taken over by publisher, Axel-Springer in 1959.

After a century of growth the ullstein bild picture archive of news photography and photojournalism was, and still is, providing real life pictures - on all areas of life, from all around the world, from the beginnings of photography until today.

In the 21st century ullstein bild is now scanning its archives which are available in the UK in English at TopFoto.co.uk

Click to search directly in ullstein bild

History of Germany from the ullstein bild collection

1871-1938 | 1939-1945 | 1946-1961 | 1962-1988 | 1989-2007

TopFoto’s in-house scanning team today passed a 10,000 milestone for the glass plate negative project, part of the company’s rescue and digitisation of archive imagery.

This rare and lovely material from the 1920s to the 1940s, the key “retro” decades, is crystal quality and every detail shows.

The company celebrated with a round of chocolate éclairs, before getting back to the task of scanning more negatives for the website and TopFoto customers.

Click here to see a tiny selection of images found in the glass plate negative project

0015444 - Tired out before the start - Waterloo, August 1920 ©Topham / TopFoto
0818691 - Lady Diana Manners (Lady Diana Cooper), starring as Queen Elizabeth, helps out with the camera during the shooting of minor scenes in “The Virgin Queen”, 26 October 1922. ©Topham / TopFoto

Alan Smith and TopFoto honoured for their outstanding contribution to the industry.

The 2007 BAPLA award for outstanding contribution to the image licensing industry has been awarded to Alan Smith and TopFoto.

Presenting the award and a bottle of single malt whisky to TopFoto’s founder and Managing Partner Alan Smith at the BAPLA AGM on Wednesday 17 October, Chairman Catherine Draycott said:

“Acquiring collection after collection over the years and amassing over 6 million pictures, Alan Smith has become a major custodian of the UK’s cultural photographic heritage. He never seemed to be phased by the huge job of taking on more collections and more to the point, of making them accessible.

TopFoto plays a key role in the picture industry world-wide and has had a long association with BAPLA and EU organisation CEPIC.

Alan Smith was induced by Paul Brown to take over the Presidency of CEPIC where he is now in his 10th year as President. He has been at the centre of the organisation in year upon year of fantastic networking and development opportunities, with the CEPIC annual Congress meetings held in locations that continue to attract delegates from Europe and far beyond making it the best meeting point for the industry worldwide.

Alan Smith said: “We were early users of computers and today have 2 million pictures on our own servers. This been a 30 year collective effort by my family, hundreds of staff, service providers such as LTT, CPL, Fotoware, Rose Deakin, Bikini lists, and suppliers and agents worldwide. Membership of BAPLA has helped a lot and there has always been somebody to talk to and share with. Membership of CEPIC recognises the importance of international trading in images. My thanks to them all.”

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.