The massive increase in the use of photography in advertising, around the 1960s, signalled for many the death-knell of the graphic artist’s / illustrator’s contribution to advertising art. Design studios switched from the skilled artist to the photographer, a new branch of photography was born, and something was lost, in an increasingly commercial environment, from the world of the many brilliant ad campaigns of the past. But we can now take pleasure in seeing again some of the best graphic advertising with the work displayed on this site, where few images are ‘photographic’. We believe the material collected here represents a fair cross-section of the style of the times (out of the millions of ads that existed even in the 1940s and 1950s), but finding good original material from the first half of the 20th century has become increasingly difficult with the passage of time. We are now being advertised to all the time, from everywhere you turn, and from an increasing number of media outlets. Ads can now be personally targeted via your smart phone, and in-your-face advertising is now so ubiquitous that we hardly notice it anymore. It this respect, we had a better world before. If you’re wondering how many of today’s ads will be avidly sought-after by tomorrow’s collectors, we suspect the answer will be: very few.
The reproductions on this site have been scanned and retouched from a collection, accumulated over many years, of ad material from posters, magazines, flyers, etc, and from public-domain web and CD sources, and are only a small part of the entire collection of ads from the late Victorian period up to approximately 1960. The initial release of about 4,000 images on this website, in ten categories, is of material that can loosely be described as being of interest to the male of the species (though not exclusively!) and will be added to as and when new images are made presentable for display. The source material varies enormously in quality, of course - wartime production, for instance, was usually on very poor quality paper - and so the size of prints that we can make available varies correspondingly.
Producing hand-made fine-art digital prints (giclée) enables quality control to be maintained at all stages, and the size of reproduction is limited by the quality of the original material. Many images from public-domain web sources do not make it to more than an A4 print, despite considerable tweaking, resizing, jpg-artifact-reduction processes and overall retouching. All prints are made on heavy-duty art papers and printed with permanent K3 pigment inks - so they have built-in light fastness for at least 60-80 years. Print costs are modest, commensurate with good quality reproduction, and are primarily designed to cover the costs of printing and the maintenance of this website. For more on the prints, click here.
Mike Howlett is an ex- lighting-cameraman in film and television and, latterly, an NHS network engineer who retired with his paper-conservator wife to Suffolk a few years ago. This website, and his own creative landscape work, to be seen on www.suffolkshots.com, keep him off the streets occasionally.
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