Excellent Work!
Each month we’ve asked Melanie Hough, curator at Getty Images, to inspire and educate us with an image from the Getty archives.
Wildlife Photography: 31st August 1931
'Wildlife Photography': Fred Morley takes on 'Aussie', the boxing kangaroo, in Trafalgar Square, 31st August 1931.
Fox Photos, one of the great press agencies of the Fleet Street golden age, didn’t believe in slow news days, but that it's really just a question of imagination. Characterised by a surreal eye and with an excellent line in animal pictures, we’ve dug this 1931 shot out from our Fox archives. The lions of Trafalgar Square sit oblivious to Fox Photos’ photographer Fred Morley, glass-plate camera in hand, squaring up to a “boxing kangaroo”. Luckily for the marsupials, both the boxing kangaroo and glass-plate camera phenomenon weren’t to last, with film becoming the press photographer’s standard in subsequent decades.
It was also Fred Morley who took the famed image of a milkman, 'Delivery After Raid', on his rounds during WWII. Walking across rubble still smouldering from the night’s raid, the staged shot epitomised the ‘Blitz spirit’ of resilience and was widely circulated on social media in the wake of the recent attacks on London. That a photograph taken 77 years ago can still resonate today is one of the remarkable qualities of the medium.
The Getty Images Hulton Archive can trace its history back to 1854. Officially established as the Hulton Picture Library in 1947, Getty Images have been at the helm since 1996, growing the Archive to some 80 million images. With photographs dating to the dawn of the medium and printed ephemera from as early as the sixteenth century, all human life and more can be discovered in its files. The largest photographic collection in private ownership, the Hulton remains a working picture library.
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