Greenhill Photo Library
The Greenhill Photo Library is a London picture library run by Sally and Richard Greenhill. Based at 357 Liverpool Road in Islington, London N1, it holds more than 300,000 photographs, in colour and in black and white, in a photo-documentary style. The pictures are mainly of people at work and in their daily lives, and the library's subjects run from child development, pregnancy and birth through education, medicine, industry, agriculture, religion and transport to old age and the environment. Unusually among picture libraries, the collection is overwhelmingly the work of the two people who run it: Sally and Richard Greenhill met in a college darkroom as teenagers at the end of the 1950s and spent the following decades photographing the world around them, building the library as a by-product — and eventually the organising form — of a lifetime's documentary photography.
Beginnings in a college darkroom
The library's own anniversary history begins with its founders meeting in a college darkroom as teenagers at the end of the 1950s. From that beginning, Sally and Richard Greenhill photographed continuously, and the library that bears their name grew out of the accumulation of that work. They later created an online collection marking fifty, and then sixty, years of the library, selecting from more than half a century of their photographs, originally prompted by their golden wedding anniversary. That personal origin distinguishes the Greenhill library from agencies founded as businesses: the stock is not assembled from the work of hundreds of contributors but is the sustained output of two documentary photographers whose subjects — ordinary people in ordinary environments, examined closely and sympathetically — were settled early and pursued for decades.
The collection: 300,000 photographs
The library's own description states that it has more than 300,000 photos, in colour and black and white, in a photo-documentary style, mainly pictures of people at work and in their daily lives. Its subject list gives the flavour in full: child development and people relaxing at home, agriculture, industry, education, hobbies, religion, transport, the environment and medicine, together with pregnancy, birth, teenagers, relationships, alternative medicine, old people, urban life and the countryside. The library describes its specialism as providing pictures of people in their everyday environments, alongside more striking pictures of childbirth and other subjects. Its site states that it specialises in unique, high-quality stock photography of people at work and in their daily lives, and that all of its images are rights-protected, with users asked to contact the library about their range. The photographers are Sally and Richard Greenhill, and the library's photo librarian is named as Denise Lalonde.
Places photographed
Although based in Islington, the Greenhills photographed far beyond London. The library's location list covers London and the wider United Kingdom, and then China, the United States of America, Greece, Borneo, Sri Lanka, France, Israel, Spain and India. Travel was a continuing part of the practice: their anniversary account records that Richard made three more trips to China in the 1980s alone, and Sally one, and in 1989 their son Sam joined Richard when he went to document the Tiananmen demonstrations in Beijing and their unhappy end — an assignment that placed the library's principals, and their family, at one of the defining news events of the decade, far from the everyday domestic subjects for which the library is best known. The combination is characteristic: a library centred on daily life, whose files also contain eyewitness documentary work from the places its photographers travelled to over sixty years.
The 1980s: computers, darkroom and postcards
The library's decade-by-decade account gives an unusually concrete picture of how a small photo library operated before the internet. By the 1980s, the Greenhills record, they had a well-established library of photographs exploring their chosen areas, while raising a young family. In that decade Sally took on the main photographic role while Richard concentrated on writing a suite of computer programmes which put barcodes on every print and transparency, tracked returns and generated invoices — an early, home-built answer to the stock library's central administrative problems of identifying physical pictures, knowing which were out with clients, and billing for their use. They were still, however, in the world of black-and-white photography, and Kaye Mayers joined them to print and run their darkroom, staying for many years; photographs of hers remain in the collection. The same account records a lighter commercial success: Sally Greenhill's photographs of punks on the street were published as postcards by Acme, providing a steady small income for many years.
Child development and everyday life
The subject structure of the library reflects the publishing markets for documentary photography of everyday life. Pregnancy, birth and child development form a sequence at the head of its subject list — subjects in perennial demand from parenting, health and education publishers, and ones that require access, trust and patience rather than news instincts. Education, teenagers and relationships follow, then medicine in both its conventional and alternative forms, old people, work in agriculture and industry, hobbies, religion, transport, the environment, urban life and the countryside. Taken together, the list describes a visual sociology of ordinary Britain and of the other countries the Greenhills photographed: how people are born, grow up, learn, work, travel, worship, sicken, age and spend their leisure, recorded in a photo-documentary style rather than staged for advertising. That consistency of approach over a very long period is what allows a library of two photographers' work to serve publishers decade after decade, as the same subjects recur in new textbooks, magazines and health publications.
Richard Greenhill the author
Richard Greenhill's photographic practice extended into print. He was the author of Photography, a book in the Macdonald guidelines series published by Macdonald Educational in April 1977, a 96-page paperback on the craft — evidence that, by the later 1970s, the library's founders were established enough in the medium to be commissioned to teach it. The book belongs to the same world as the library itself: practical, educational publishing, of the kind that also bought documentary photographs of work, home and school life, and in which clear, well-made images of real activities were the stock in trade.
Licensing and the move to Alamy
For most of its life the library licensed its pictures directly: its address at 357 Liverpool Road in Islington, its telephone and fax numbers, and its own website at srgreenhill.co.uk were the points of contact, and its site invited users to enquire about using an image, quoting the subject area of interest, with permissions handled by the library itself. In its current presentation, the library directs users elsewhere for licensing: its website notes that the Greenhill Photo Library can now be licensed and accessed at Alamy, the large online stock platform, while contact by email remains possible, and the anniversary history site repeats that photographs from the library can be licensed at Alamy. The change reflects the wider migration of small, specialist libraries onto the big platforms, where their distinctive collections gain searchable distribution without the cost of maintaining a full transactional catalogue of their own.
Anniversary histories
The Greenhills have documented their own history in unusual detail. To celebrate their golden wedding anniversary they created a collection drawn from more than half a century of their photographs, published online as a fifty-year history of the library and later extended to a sixty-year history, organised by decade. The 1980s chapter, for example, interweaves the professional and the domestic: travel to China, a son accompanying his father to Tiananmen Square, computer programmes written to barcode the files, a darkroom assistant who stayed for years, and punk postcards selling steadily. Few stock libraries possess so personal a published archive of themselves, and it gives the collection a documented provenance: the circumstances in which large parts of the stock were taken are recorded by the photographers themselves.
Significance
The Greenhill Photo Library is significant as a survival of a particular kind of British picture library: the photographer-owned, subject-led library, built from its founders' own work and run from a London house, in this case in Liverpool Road, Islington. Its 300,000 photographs of people at work and in their daily lives constitute a long-run documentary record of everyday experience — birth, childhood, schooling, work, faith, illness and old age — made by two photographers working together from the end of the 1950s onwards, supplemented by travel and news documentary work from China to Borneo. Its trajectory, from darkroom prints and barcoded transparencies to licensing through a global platform, mirrors the history of the British picture library trade itself, while the anniversary histories its founders published ensure that the library, unusually, documents its documenters.
