An original press photograph portrait of Winston S. Churchill taken in 1935 by the London photography studio Elliott & Fry.
London: The Daily Telegraph, 1935. Photograph. This original 1935 press photograph portrait of Winston S. Churchill was taken by the important London photography studio Elliott & Fry. The gelatin silver print on glossy photo paper measures 6.125 x 4.25 inches (15.6 x 10.8 cm). Condition is very good minus. The paper is crisp and clean with some light wear and bruising to the corners, a hint of silvering, and minor scuffing visible only under raking light. This press photo belonged to the archives of The Daily Telegraph. The verso bears the copyright stamp of “Elliott & Fry, Ltd.”, a partially illegible received stamp of The Daily Telegraph from 1935, and some handwritten notations.
The National Portrait Gallery calls Elliott & Fry “one of the most important in the history of studio portraiture in London.” The studio was opened in 1863 by Joseph John Elliott (1835-1903) and Clarence Edmund Fry (1840-1897) who quickly built a thriving business capturing a bevy of Victorian luminaries from Darwin to Kipling to Ruskin. During the Blitz of WWII the 63 Baker Street studio, the firm’s headquarters since 1922, was bombed. Consequently, most of the early negatives, printed on highly flammable nitrate film, were destroyed. Today the National Portrait Gallery holds the few negatives that remain. Although the NPG holds copies of a number of Elliott & Fry portraits of Winston Churchill, this image is not among them.
When this photograph was taken in 1935 Churchill was in the midst of his "Wilderness Years" of the 1930s, out of power and out of favor, warning about the dangers of a rising Nazi Germany, often at odds with both his party leadership and prevailing public sentiment. While he retained his Epping seat in the 1935 General election, when his Conservative Party took the premiership Churchill was not invited to join the Cabinet and his long political arc seemed in irredeemable decline. By September 1939 he had rejoined the Cabinet and by May 1940 he was Prime Minister.
This press photo once belonged to The Daily Telegraph’s working archive. During the first half of the twentieth century, photojournalism grew as a practice, fundamentally changing the way the public interacted with current events. Newspapers assembled expansive archives, including physical copies of all photographs published or deemed useful for potential future use, their versos typically marked with ink stamps and notes providing provenance and captions. Photo departments would often take brush, paint, pencil, and marker to the surface of photographs themselves to edit them before publication. Today these photographs exist as repositories of historical memory, technological artifacts, and often striking pieces of vernacular art. Item #008982
Price: $250.00