The Lost Art of the Picture Library

Until relatively recently, the Guardian and Observer newspapers maintained a working picture library of 100,000 files divided, more or less equally, between personalities and subjects. The earliest date from the 1860s and at least three-quarters are black and white. The files are wonderfully democratic: the work of staff photographers alongside an original Madame Yevonde or Cartier-Bresson alongside an agency wire photo discoloured to the point of illegibility. There are few examples of pristine, vintage prints because the reverse was often used to record the photographer's details, rights, captions, crop information, and the date of each publication. The "cataloguing" conventions used by different generations of picture editors are wildly inconsistent but imagine the thrill at finding an original portrait of Trotsky with the following recorded on the reverse: "rec'dfrom A Ransome 18th March /26".

From the 1920s to the 1960s, newspapers used photographs sparingly and the image was almost invariably, subservient to the text. The May 1 1931 edition of the Guardian has 10 photos over 18 pages. Picture editors occupied a sedate world where it was entirely appropriate to use a file picture rather than dispatch a staff photographer . It was also a common practice to amass speculative reference photos; our collection has hundreds of these on subjects as diverse as "bricks", "milk", "Tupperware," "wind tunnels'"and "vagrancy". The advent of features sections and colour magazines in the 1960s changed all of that. The 35mm camera became standard issue and technologies were developed to enable the easy and rapid transfer of pictures. With the increased use of colour and the introduction of digital technology, picture libraries fell into decline, darkrooms were closed, and from the 1990s, film became almost obsolete. Nowadays, anything up to 15,000 pictures are accessed online each day of which about 200 end up in the paper. Images from the picture library are still used but this tends to be largely on the obituary pages.

In 2002 the Scott Trust, proprietor of the Guardian and Observer, established an archive where historical material relating to the histories of both titles is collected, preserved in perpetuity, and made available for study. This includes what remains of the 100,000 picture files which have been stripped of any non-archival material, reboxed, and catalogued. Two bespoke archival vaults with state-of-the-art environmental control have been created at Guardian News and Media's new office, Kings Place, one for paper and one for photos, where the collections will cared for, studied and loved.

The 70 pictures chosen for this exhibition and publication are an idiosyncratic sample of a wildly idiosyncratic collection. There is much that is familiar: 20th-century dictators get a good showing as does sport. But it is the uncanny ones that make a lasting impression: bullet holes in a door from a crime scene in Liverpool, a lonesome bottle of milk on a doorstep. And then there is the wonderful shot of Marilyn Munroe being ushered through a crowd with a stern-looking Arthur Miller in the background. The blue of the picture editor's crop lines could not be more explicit; they exclude everything except that face which was never more alive than when being photographed.

LUKE DODD
November 2008

Exhibition touring to:
University Gallery, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne
5 June - 17 July 2009
http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/universitygallery/
Tel: 0191 227 4424