This website was created on April 16th 2009 in response to the bulk requests for removal of pictures featuring National Trust (UK) properties, from the major online stock image portal Alamy.
The title, however, does not refer to the UK National Trust only. There are many such named organisations worldwide and this site does not purport to represent any of them or pass itself off. Links will be provided to the photographic resources of all such trusts, including the UK. To request a link email the editor.
In response to demands by the UK National Trust Photo Library that all images other than their own, or specific authorised material, be removed Alamy searched for keywords mentioning known properties. This caught in the net tens of thousands of images taken of other nearby properties at the same places, unconnected with NT. It also caught pictures legitimately taken from public highways, public footpaths, and viewpoints outwith the boundaries of NT properties. Such pictures can not be controlled by the Trust and can be exhibited, sold or published without constraint.
Inferior to art or writing? Or just seen as money-grubbing?
The Trust’s actions and attitude are nothing new, but place photographers in a second-class position relative to writers and artists. No constraint is placed on any author or journalist mentioning or describing a Trust property, whether salaried or selling their work on spec; no demands are placed on art galleries to remove paintings (observed, copied from references, or imaginary) featuring Trust properties. Nor are artists prevented from selling their output!
The Trust itself is a guardian of the creative output of past generations, including the birthplace of the founder of pictorial photography W H Fox Talbot at Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire. Fox Talbot effectively gave his commercial secret away – unlike Daguerre who closely guarded his franchises – and part of his success lay in photographing heritage properties. His illustrations of the settings of Sir Walter Scott’s ‘Marmion’, following in the easel-marks of Turner whom Scott invited to sketch and paint them, are the origin of travel photography.
Successive generations of photographers, paid and unpaid, documented the heritage of Britain’s architecture, scenery and culture with rarely more than a polite request not to obstruct visitors with their tripods. The collections of Francis Frith, J Allan Cash and other early pioneers of the photographic library or archive would be nothing without the access they were allowed to countless private and public properties. Great photography depends on the light, the conditions, the disposition of figures in the scene, timing, serendipity, skill, observation… but above all, on being there!
Great photography is not produced by wrangling for rights to take pictures before you even start, or constraint on what you do with those pictures. Maybe one in ten thousand images today would be called ‘good’ and it might take a million to find something ‘great’. The Trust (a private foundation, not a government body) has a duty of care to ensure that the future has access to the same creative art and documentary evidence we enjoy today, and not just from a small body of retained official photographers or one edited photographic library.
Stock photography, even digital stock photography where images are counted in millions, is still art. It is not by nature inferior to any other art medium. The aquisition of small sums for the publication of pictures by photographers is no more a ‘commercial’ activity than the patronage sought by the painters, gardeners, architects, crafstmen and artisans who brought what the Trust now ‘owns’ into existence.
This website exists to allow discussion of this issue, and to provide links to the collections of those who have photographed ‘banned’ properties and places legitimately (from exterior viewpoints). In some cases, as with much of the scenic shoreline of the British Isles and large tracts of National Park in the Lakes and elsewhere, the Trust’s theoretical ban on ‘commercial’ photography (anything likely to be published) deserves to be ignored outright.
- David Kilpatrick FBIPP Hon.FMPA