TopFoto Blog

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.”

How do we get on the housing ladder? What will we do when the oil runs out?

TopFoto doesn’t have the answers but we do have a great collection of images for an alternative look at transport and housing. TopFoto presents just a few of our favourites

Alternative Housing

Alternative Transport

1053126 - Mr. and Mrs. Steward at the door of their thatched roof trolley bus, 1952 ©Topham / TopFoto
1093477 - Professional frogman Courtney Brown tows a 55-foot scale model of the Titanic ©Topham / TopFoto

In the first London Olympic Games, 100 years ago (July 1908), Italian marathon runner Dorando Pietri collapsed 5 times from dehydration but kept going until finally deprived of his win by hasty aides who helped him over the finish line. Pietri got a special award in recognition of his great showing of the Olympic Spirit.

With 300 days to go until the Beijing Games, and British eyes on London 2012,
TopFoto presents a gallery of every Summer Olympic Games throughout history.

0007216 - Italian marathon runner Dorando Pietri at the 1908 London Olympics ©Topham / TopFoto
0091573 - Passing the Olympic Flame on its way to the 1948 London Olympics ©Topham / TopFoto
0827960 - Kelly Holmes wins the 1500m at the 2004 Athens Olympics ©Professional Sport / TopFoto

1 October 2008 is 100 years since the revolutionary Model T Ford went on sale, making motoring affordable and reliable for the masses, instead of the complex plaything of the wealthy and their chauffeurs. 48% of the automobile market fell to Ford in just six years.

TopFoto presents a gallery on Henry Ford and his Model T

1095309 - Before the Model T Ford revolution, cars such as The Pierce Arrow were expensive,
complicated and for the wealthy few. ©Topham / TopFoto
0834421 - Henry Ford ©Topham / TopFoto
0967519 - The model T. Ford went on sale on 1 October 1908 ©Topham / TopFoto

J K Rowling has only just beaten Enid Blyton into first place as the world’s best selling children’s author. Camera-shy Blyton’s books have sold over 400 million copies worldwide, rising by 2 million every year. A major new biography of her comes out this October: Looking for Enid by Duncan McLaren (Portobello Books).

Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev, lived in Russia and France, and died in Auschwitz in August 1942. One of her great unpublished novels, Suite Française, was discovered and released last year, decades after her death, to huge public and critical acclaim. A second miraculous survivor, Fire in the Blood is “a literary find of the same quality”, according to the Sunday Times, and now published in the English language.

TopFoto is proud to have supplied the cover photographs for both Suite Française and Fire in the Blood (Chatto & Windus).

Click here for Enid Blyton and Irène Némirovsky

0361862 - Enid Blyton ©UPPA / TopFoto
rv18776-1 ©Roger-Viollet / TopFoto - on the cover of Fire in the Blood (Chatto & Windus)
rv10320-3 - Irène Némirovsky ©Roger-Viollet / TopFoto
rv17590-2 ©Roger-Viollet / TopFoto - on the cover of Suite Française (Chatto & Windus)

50 years ago the Soviet Union made history. The launch of Sputnik 1 – just 98 minutes orbit by a satellite the size of a basketball – was a massive story which caught the world unawares. It triggered the formation of NASA and the Cold War space race and was the first in a line of extraordinary Russian firsts that that included the first “earthling” in space (the dog Laika), the first man in space (Yuri Gagarin) and the first space walk (Alexei Leonov). The genius behind it all was the shadowy figure of Sergei Korolev (“King” in Russian) who survived 8 years in Siberian gulag as a victim of Stalin’s Great Purge before taking on leadership of the Soviet space programme.

TopFoto has the Sputnik launch shot plus a gallery of images.
For a different perspective why not try Space According to PUNCH

October 4 1957 – Sputnik 1
November 3 1957 – Sputnik 2 (Laika)
December 6 1957 – US first attempt explodes (Vanguard TV3)
October 1 1958 – formation of NASA
April 12 1961 – first human in space
March 18 1965 – first space walk

p000376 - Cover of Punch, 6 November 1957 ©Punch Ltd / TopFoto
1040812 - The launch of Sputnik 1, 4 October 1957    ©RIA Novosti / TopFoto
1054197 - Sputnik 1, the first man-made satellite ©RIA Novosti / TopFoto

1908 was a BIG year. A meteor exploded in Siberia (luckily), felling 80 million trees… or was it a UFO? Transport took off with the Wright brothers and Henry Ford. Women’s fashion was tailored and elegant, with big hats. The Last Emperor of China began his reign. Stalin was arrested and Lenin arrived in St Petersburg in a sealed train. Turkey got a constitution. Six cars entered the great New York to Paris race. The Austro-Hungarian Empire annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina. Ian Fleming was born and so was the FBI. London hosted the 1908 Olympics. The first major suffragette demonstration drew unprecedented crowds to Hyde Park.
And a very good year for Winston Churchill, who not only got promoted to Cabinet (President of the Board of Trade) but also got married to Miss Clementine Hozier.

1908 Selected Gallery

RV1082-2 - Henri Farman the first aviator to fly 1km in Europe ©Roger-Viollet / TopFoto
wha001574 - Pu-Yi (Hsuan T’ung). Last Emperor of China 1908-1912 ©World History Archive / TopFoto
0483479 - Dorando of Italy, first in the Marathon is disqualified at the London Olympics ©Topham / TopFoto

The Panama Canal, one of the greatest engineering feats of all time, is being expanded to cope with the massive demand and increasing size of ships. On one occasion a US ship, despite painstaking measurements in advance, expanded in the heat and stuck fast – and when you look at TopFoto’s superb gallery on the Canal you can see why.

Greenpeace boats, nuclear waste transporters, pleasure cruises, private yachts and aircraft carriers… the Panama Canal sees them all.

2007: 30 years since the Panama Canal Treaty (7 September 1977)
2007: 100 years since George Washington Goethals appointed Chief Engineer of the Panama Canal
2008: 80 years since Richard Halliburton swam the Panama Canal
2009: 10 years since Panama took over the Canal
2014: 100 years since the opening of the Panama Canal

Pictures of The Panama Canal - The Panama Canal by Jon Mitchell

Then and Now
RV10333-4 - With room to spare in the 1930s ©Roger-Viollet / TopFoto
0483479 - A tight squeeze for a modern tanker ©Colin Jones / TopFoto

In 1968, the Caravan Sites Act, proposed by Liberal Democrat MP Eric Lubbock, forced local authorities in the UK to provide sites for Gypsies and Travellers. That statutory duty was overturned in 1994 by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act.

Ahead of next year’s 40 anniversary, TopFoto takes a look at Gypsy life in England before the 1968 laws came into effect – plus a few wider images of Gypsies, from Austria to Iraq.

Go straight to pictures

0984244 - Gypsies on the Epsom Downs for the Derby 3 June 1919
©Topham / TopFoto

Later this year, deep space probe Voyager 2, still sending back information 30 years after launch, will go through the heliosheath (where the sun’s influence ends and inter-stellar space begins). And TopFoto is right there with it. In 1977 we provided this Olympic games picture for the famous Golden Records, details of life on earth in case an alien species picks up this cosmic message in a bottle. TopFoto’s image has reached 7.8 billion miles from Earth (12.6 billion km) and is going strong.

Go straight to pictures

0062739 - TopFoto’s Olympic sprinters were carefully chosen to show different races of human beings, the Olympics having been identified as the perfect place to find such a scene. It was also chosen to reveal the musculature of the leg and give a clue that we are not just runners but also spectators, and that there is competition. ©Picturepoint / TopFoto