# @gettyimages on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/CB8h2PoJzaA
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/16446088-gettyimages-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/thumbnails/480c5b43f0.jpg
- **Posted:** 2020-06-27T16:47:18.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Getty Images (@GettyImages) — https://gondola.cc/GettyImages

## Caption

While 2020 marks 25 years of Getty Images, the collections in our care stretch back to the beginnings of photography and beyond. ⁠Here, gettyarchive curator melanie__llewellyn introduces a photograph that has come to represent resilience - for more reasons than one.⁠
⁠
On the night of 27 September 1940, Holland House, a historic London property, was hit by a torrent of incendiary bombs during a ten hour raid. While only the east wing survived intact, the contents of the otherwise damaged library were remarkably unscathed. ⁠
In a prime piece of "keep calm & carry on" propaganda, the photo agency Central Press staged a series of shots in the ruins, showing browsers apparently unfazed by the surrounding destruction. The photographer has not been credited, as was typical at the time. One figure stands hand in pockets, another with arm outreached, the third already invested in a volume - a full sequence, the brims of their hats mimicking the fallen beams, ladders, & empty window frames. Amongst the chaos, order is reasserting itself.⁠
The original 5x4 glass plate negative of the image is now housed in our Hulton Archive, along with a number of the books seen in the picture. ⁠
The Rischgitz Collection had evolved from a late-19th century British picture licensing business founded by “the Peter Pan of Fleet Street”, Augustus Rischgitz. By 1940, his niece, Louie Boutroy, had taken on the agency with comparable vigour. After the bombing of Holland House, it is said that Boutroy helped recover many precious volumes from the library aided by a group of GIs with wheelbarrows. Unknowingly, the salvage operation was to be a drill; the Rischgitz itself was later bombed. Deemed a collection of national significance, it was rescued with great daring from the ensuing fire.⁠
The collection acquired by the Hulton in 1947, these antiquarian books now sit meters away from the negatives that detail their near-oblivion, as if the emulsion has leapt from the plate. Included are a set of the 1751 Encyclopédie by Diderot, proving that Enlightenment endures beyond the bomb.⁠
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📷: Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images | #GettyImages25 #PreservingThePast #HultonArchive #GettyArchive⁠

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## Tags

gettyimages25, preservingthepast, hultonarchive, gettyarchive

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