Our History
Paul Popper
The origins of the Popperfoto archive date back to 1934, when the Czech photographer, editor and publisher Paul Popper emigrated to the UK and started his eponymous business. Popper had moved to Berlin as a young man after serving in the Austrian Army, and there he began his career in journalism. By 1933 Berlin had become increasingly dangerous for Jewish people, and Popper decided to leave his home in Germany to try his luck in London.
Living in an attic bedroom in Holborn, close to Fleet Street, he started Paul Popper Ltd, a photographic agency representing many photographers from Germany and Eastern Europe, as well as taking his own photographs and writing stories. Popper and his young wife Erica ran the company together, and over the next 30 years it flourished and grew. Popper’s first big break came when he purchased the collection of Scott’s Antarctic Expedition after Herbert Ponting died in 1935 and he would subsequently acquire the Exclusive News Agency and the ‘Illustrated’ Magazine archive, a rival to Picture Post. Paul Popper died in 1969 by which time Popperfoto was established as one of Fleet Street’s best known picture agencies.
About Us
Popperfoto is one of the largest and oldest independently owned image archives in Europe. Today it contains more than 14 million images, covering subjects from sports to celebrities, politics and armed conflict. The archive contains one of the finest collections of rare colour photographs from World War II, a thorough collection of Royalty from across the globe, as well as stunning collections from the worlds of sport and show business.
Our exclusive Image Partnership with Getty Images allows us to license our pictures from their platform on a Worldwide basis. Our images are used in a variety of media, including film & television, print & digital journalism and book publishing. Behind the scenes at Popperfoto there is a team working on digitising thousands of analogue photographs, retouching and restoring them to get the best out of the images, before adding invaluable captions and keywords, known as ‘metadata’.
Bob Thomas
In 1990 the Popperfoto archive was acquired by the Northampton-based photographer Bob Thomas. Thomas had a keen interest in photography as a schoolboy, when he would take pictures of his local football team at weekends. He went on to become an award-winning sports photographer, starting his own business in 1975, with his mentor Monte Fresco eventually leaving his position at the Daily Mirror to join him as chief executive of the business in 1988. Thomas was looking to expand and diversify his successful organisation, leading to his acquisition of the Popperfoto archive in 1990. Two years later, the archive was moved out of London, to a new home in Northamptonshire countryside.
The Old Mill
At the beginning of 1992, Popperfoto moved from London’s Fleet Street to a beautifully restored mill on a farmyard just outside of Northampton. The Old Mill was built in the 19th century and it was renovated to a very high standard to provide the perfect environment for the historic and contemporary images in the archive. The premises boasted the latest colour processing facilities and a modern darkroom. A motorcycle courier made daily deliveries of pictures to London in order to maintain the service that clients had came to expect from Popperfoto.
The Archive Today
As technology has developed over the past 30 years, much has changed in the way that Popperfoto operates. Photographs from our archive can now be licensed online in a few clicks through our exclusive partnership with Getty Images. What has remained the same, however, is that the Popperfoto archive continues to grow with stunning and fascinating collections of photography which are curated, scanned and restored with the greatest care to bring them into the digital age.