
3TOPFOTO |
BEST PRACTICE REPRESENTATIVE
Global relevance
As a digital business, we work
globally with publishers, newspapers,
magazines, TV companies and museums
to license images for book covers,
films, exhibitions, articles and online
storytelling. That is the core business,
but at a time when the public still have
a living connection with the strongest
decades in our collections, the 1920s to
the 1960s, the rapid increase in public
engagement has taken us by surprise
and presents an opportunity. There
is rising activity around ancestry and
identity. We hold photographs of people
and places, stored in a way that is readily
accessible at pace, driven by obsession
with quality and custodianship, an
obsession shared by all our staff. This
allows us to feed a media wanting to
keep up with public appetite and interest
while keeping content fresh over time.
Of course, it is powerful to have a
unique portrait of Audrey Hepburn
and to be the only source for John
Hedgecoe’s 1966 photograph of Her
Majesty for the postage stamp, a
photograph that is practically a leading
brand in its own right, but the greatest
thrill for me is the willing engagement
of the public, responding to authentic
pictures telling authentic stories. A
Liverpool newspaper, for example,
published our pictures from a Bootle
slum, taken to illustrate the founding of
the NHS. The girl shown is now elderly
and her daughter sent in memories,
names and facts, which acts as precious
enrichment and a resource for future
generations. Part of the magic is
that you never know the future of an
image. After all, when Ken Russell was
a photographer in the early 1950s, few
had heard of him, much less would have
preserved his archive. Yet at TopFoto,
you can trace the developing eye of the
future film legend behind
Women in
Love
,
Tommy
and
Savage Messiah
.
From celebrities to unnamed families,
the strengths of the archive work
internationally through a global
network of key agency contracts built
up over 30 years. We represent great
US and European archives, such as
Alinari, Granger, Roger Viollet and
Ullstein, and we distribute our images
through them and others worldwide,
the flow taking the content up to the
present day.
Cutting through the noise
There is a lot of noise in the picture
business. It’s no secret that a few
massive platforms dominate, and
when customers are short of time
and resources, it can be hard to
communicate the tremendous
added value they get from working
with us. As a private enterprise
with the intrinsic value of a great
museum, I believe our future involves
entrepreneurial partnerships with
academic and heritage bodies. What
if, as a country, we transformed
180 years of priceless hard copy
photography to dynamic files, visible
to all? When it comes to the UK’s
photographic treasures, the heritage
value is as much in the viewable image
as in the physical photograph. Quality
is the key and we never lose sight
of this. We focus on the customer,
modernising to stay competitive,
allowing our love of history and the
universal language of photographs to
flow outwards, bringing interesting
collaborations in on the tide.
I believe our
future involves
entrepreneurial
partnerships
with academic
and heritage
bodies
“
“
We are the sole official
source for John Hedgecoe’s
seminal photograph of Her
Majesty the Queen. Taken
in 1966 it has global cachet
and recognition as the most
reproduced image ever,
because it is used on the
postage stamp.
The Church of God, Pine
Mountain, Kentucky,
USA in 1948