As Sarah and I are both employees of Getty Images, we had the opportunity to get an inside look at the Getty Archive in east London on this trip. The Getty Archive is a collection of 80 million photos and films across nearly all possible media: paper prints, cellulose and glass negatives, video tape, and even images made onto leather. The earliest date back almost 200 years to the birth of photography (well before it was even called that).
Our tour guide was Matthew Butson, the VP of the Archive. He was an excellent speaker and showman, recounting far more stories than I could hope to write here. I’ll add some snippets to my album photos. Overall, it was a fascinating, entertaining, and unique experience that I’m very thankful to have had.
We spent the rest of our final day tooling around London. We took the Tower Bridge tour and then met up with my dear sister Cynthia and her partner Gavin for dinner and drinks. Tomorrow is our long journey home.
Entrance to the Archive.
Mural of photojournalists, shot by a photojournalist.
A Darjeeling musician.
80 million items in the Archive. Only 0.7% have been digitized. 80% have never even been seen before.
Matthew in storytelling mode.
Photojournalist getting the shot of a building on fire during The Blitz in WW2.
A magazine index book, detailing all of the information for the photos in a particular collection. This is just as important to us as the photo itself.
A print of an American soldier in the Vietnam War.
Part of the fire suppression system.
The name plate for a ship that was never built in honour of the late Princess Diana.
Cases filled with prints and negatives of the British Royal Family.
One of the non-photographic works in the Archive. These drawings were from the 1700s if I remember correctly.
A playbill for Peter Pan from the 1800s.
Promotional photo for Peter Pan.
A NASA film canister, unopened.
Getting an inside look at the digitization process.
Learning about photo restoration and preservation.
Some Science on the board. Stay in school, kids.
Some old (Russian?) nobility photos, one of them missing a piece.
What happens when (earlier) preservation measures go wrong. You can barely make out the image on this otherwise-destroyed negative.
As a negative degrades, sometimes you can separate out the different layers and rescue some information.
Just a £4.3 million signed print of Whoopi Goldberg in a milk bath shot by Annie Leibovitz.
One of the most valuable single pieces in the Archive.
A photograph of Salvador Dali, with an accompanying letter written by him commissioning it.
Photos from Japan by one of the few Westerners allowed into the country at that time.
Early Deguerrotypes and Tin Types.
A tiny Tin Type portrait made for a cameo in the early 1800s.
One of the earliest pet photos. The dog is probably dead, as it would have had to sit still for upwards of an hour to expose the paper properly.
A photo negative exposed directly onto paper.
Drawings from the funeral procession of Lord Nelson.
The most expensive collection in the Archive: the first photos out of Yosemite.
