Short films and pictures

Just as we can’t help having favourites among our children (come on now, who really loves them ‘all the same’?) we can’t love all aspects of our job equally. And I’m sorry to say the unloved runt of my professional litter is picture research. I have spent hours trawling obscure websites in the increasingly vain hope that somewhere, deep in the bowels of the internet, I’ll find the perfect image of the Duke of Rochester, or the human heart, or a monkey playing a banjo, or whatever it is my author desperately requires. It’s a fiddly, time-consuming and often frustrating job.

Until recently, however, I had given no thought to how much worse it must be for the hapless picture archivists whose desks we regularly deluge with implausible, bizarre and ill-thought-out requests. There are several libraries we regularly hit up for images, such as the Bridgeman, the National Portrait Gallery and the National Gallery and, of these, the Getty picture library is probably one of the biggest, with about 65 million images in its collection. No doubt sick of receiving idiotically broad briefs from editors such as myself (‘We need a painting of King Richard. Which one? Umm, all of them?’) last autumn they sponsored a competition through regular London short film evening Short and Sweet aimed at illustrating the many ways in which the archive could be used. Check out the four very different, very entertaining results, particularly the winning entry, ‘Photograph of Jesus’, which provides a wonderfully rueful insight into the often ludicrous lot of the picture archivist.