Ordinary pictures
On 1 October 1938, as war threatened, a new weekly magazine was launched in Britain. Backed by founder of the Hulton Press, Edward Hulton, and under the editorship first of Hungarian émigré Stefan Lorant (1938-1940) then Tom Hopkinson (1940-1950), it revolutionised the photo-story. An eclectic mix of British and European photographers utilising the freedom of new handheld camera technology enabled Picture Post to deliver powerful stories, often of ordinary people, direct to the public. Reported to have had five million readers at its peak, the magazine changed the face of photography in Britain.
At the turn of the 21st century, Getty Images merged London-based Hulton Picture Collection with Archive Film and Photos, New York creating Hulton Archive, a remarkable visual resource of over 80 million images contained within 1,500 individual collections. At the heart of the Hulton collections is magazine. According to archive curator Melanie Llewellyn (as reported in AP 24 August 2019), ‘Between 1938 and 1957, over 9,000 articles were commissioned for . Only 2,000 of these actually ran in the magazine and the other 7,000 were filed away. Around half a dozen photographs accompanied each published article, from the hundreds, sometimes thousands of negatives the photographers delivered, creating a colossal archive of unpublished andand much more needs to be. It’s from this rich source that several ventures have recently been created to help make sure the legacy of is not forgotten.
