Popperfoto

About Popperfoto

Popperfoto is one of the largest and oldest image archives in Europe, a picture library whose collection spans 150 years of photographic history from the Victorian era to the modern age. Founded in 1934 by the Czech photojournalist Paul Popper, who had emigrated from Berlin to London, the archive holds more than 12 million monochrome photographs and more than 750,000 colour photographs documenting historical events, politics, sport and entertainment. Owned by Paul Popper Ltd and based in Moulton Park, Northampton, it is licensed and marketed through Getty Images, though it remains privately owned and independently administered.

Paul Popper and the founding

Popperfoto was founded in 1934 by Paul Popper, a Czech-born photojournalist and magazine writer and editor who emigrated to London from Berlin in the 1930s. Popper built the business into a picture library at a time when the illustrated press was reaching its zenith, supplying photographs to newspapers and magazines that relied on agencies and archives for the images that filled their pages. From its London beginnings the archive grew steadily, absorbing collections of various topics alongside its commissioned photojournalism.

Paul Popper died in 1969. Between his death and 1990 the company passed through several owners, before it was acquired in 1990 by Bob Thomas, the current owner and director of the business. Under Thomas's stewardship the archive has been consolidated and commercially developed, with licensing partnerships that have made its images available to publishers, broadcasters and picture buyers around the world.

The scale of the archive

The Popperfoto collection contains more than 12 million monochrome photographs and over 750,000 colour transparencies, spanning 150 years of photography. Getty Images, which markets the collection, describes it as containing over 14 million images. The content ranges from documentation of great historical events to photographs of personalities from politics, sport and entertainment, to specialist collections covering topics from fashion to European royalty, humour and social history.

The sheer chronological depth of the archive is one of its distinguishing features. It holds material from the earliest decades of photography through the two world wars and into the colour era, making it a resource for publishers, documentary makers and researchers working across the whole sweep of modern history.

The Scott Antarctic expedition

Among the most important holdings in the Popperfoto collection are the original negatives from Herbert Ponting's photographic record of Robert Falcon Scott's 1910–1912 Antarctic voyage aboard the Terra Nova. Ponting was the expedition's official photographer and cinematographer, and his images of the Antarctic ice, the expedition's ships and the men who sailed south with Scott are among the most famous photographs of exploration ever made.

The survival of the original negatives in the Popperfoto archive gives the collection a unique place in the history of photography. Ponting's work documented not only the expedition's heroics but its daily life and its tragic outcome, and the images remain in constant demand from publishers, museums and broadcasters telling the story of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration.

Colour photography of the Second World War

Another celebrated strength of the archive is its colour photography from the front lines of the Second World War. While the conflict is most familiar in black and white, Popperfoto holds colour photographs taken in various theatres of the war, images that bring an immediacy and unfamiliar vividness to the most documented event of the twentieth century.

The colour war photography sits alongside the archive's vast monochrome coverage of the conflict and the home front, and has been widely published in books, newspapers and documentaries. A published volume drawn from the archive, The Book (Popperfoto), gathered 1,000 colour and black-and-white images under headings including sport, World War II and personalities, illustrating the range that a single library could offer.

Sport and the World Cup collection

Sport is one of the great strengths of the Popperfoto archive, and its World Cup collection is regarded as one of the finest anywhere in the world. The collection's football holdings cover every World Cup from the first tournament in 1930, with celebrated images including England captain Bobby Moore hoisting the Jules Rimet trophy in 1966, Brazil's Pelé admiring the trophy in 1958, Pickles the dog who found the stolen World Cup trophy in 1966, and England's victory over West Germany in the 1966 final at Wembley.

Thomas has noted that the archive holds what he describes as the most complete archive on the life of Pelé, and that the 1966 files have been in constant demand, particularly around anniversaries of England's World Cup victory. Alamy represents more than 75,000 Popperfoto images, including an important part of the World Cup library, making Popperfoto one of the largest contributors to Alamy's image library.

Personalities and entertainment

Beyond news and sport, the archive is rich in portraits of the personalities who defined the twentieth century. Its holdings include images of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Muhammad Ali, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner, Brigitte Bardot, Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Dusty Springfield and Dizzy Gillespie, alongside statesmen, royalty and cultural figures.

The music and entertainment photography reflects the archive's long service to the illustrated press, which in the post-war decades devoted ever more space to popular culture. The personality files span the great names of film, music and public life across many decades, from Princess Elizabeth on royal tour to the Live Aid concert.

Athletics and Olympic history

The archive's sporting reach extends well beyond football. Its athletics holdings include images of Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile in 1954, one of the defining sporting moments of the twentieth century, held within the Bob Thomas Sports Photography (BTSP) collection. Olympic and World Cup photographs form an important part of the collection's sports coverage, alongside tennis, golf, cricket and motor sport.

The BTSP collection, like Popperfoto itself, was added to Getty Images' website in the mid-2000s, with more than 100,000 images from the two collections made available for licensing alongside Getty's own Hulton Archive. The two collections complement each other: Popperfoto's historical depth and BTSP's specialist sports strength.

The Getty Images partnership

In 2006 Getty Images negotiated marketing and licensing control of the Popperfoto collection, bringing the archive's images onto the world's largest commercial picture platform. The deal was announced alongside the addition of the Bob Thomas Sports Photography collection, and the Popperfoto images were licensed alongside Getty Images' Hulton Archive, which contains tens of millions of images.

Crucially, the arrangement left ownership untouched: while Getty Images exclusively markets the collection, Popperfoto remains privately owned by Paul Popper Ltd and is independently administered from its Northampton base. The partnership gave the archive global distribution while preserving its independence, a model that has served it for two decades.

The Northampton base

Paul Popper Limited is the rightsholder of the Popperfoto collection, and Bob Thomas is the current director of the business, based in Moulton Park, Northampton, England. The Northampton headquarters administers the physical and digital archive, manages rights and works with licensing partners including Getty Images and Alamy.

The company's presence in Northampton, rather than London where it was founded, reflects the economics of running a vast physical archive: the millions of negatives, prints and transparencies require extensive secure storage, and the East Midlands base has housed the business through its modern era.

Popperfoto today

Today Popperfoto is marketed by Getty Images as one of the UK's oldest and largest independently-owned image libraries, offering historic European rights-managed images to publishers, broadcasters, advertisers and researchers. Its collection continues to be digitised and made available, with new material added and fresh demand driven by anniversaries, documentaries and the endless appetite of the illustrated media for authentic historical imagery.

From the Ponting Antarctic negatives to the 1966 World Cup final, from wartime colour film to the faces of twentieth-century popular culture, the archive that Paul Popper began in 1934 remains one of the great visual records of the modern age, a London-founded, Northampton-kept library that has outlived the photojournalist who created it by more than half a century.