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BAPLA honors Mary Evans with Lifetime Achievement Award
At the recent 2007 Picture Buyers' Fair The British Association for Picture Libraries and Agencies (BAPLA) awarded long-time stock photo industry veteran, Mary Evans, with a Lifetime Achievement award. Mary Evans, a pioneer in stock licensing, is the co-founder (with her husband Hilary), of The Mary Evans Picture Library and is also a founding member of BAPLA in 1975.
Mary was launched into what would later become a life-long career as a book collector who maintained a treasured collection of illustrated childhood books and began to search antiquarian bookshops, fairs, junk shops and sale rooms for all sorts of subjects that were of interest. As the collection grew Mary and Hilary realised that they could turn their hobby into a viable business by making their substantial collection of images available to commercial picture buyers. The Mary Evans Picture Library launched in October 1964 with a handful of picture files. The business is now recognized as a unique source of illustrations, photographs, engravings, books, cartoons, maps, and ephemera on all subjects historical.
In an interview for The Times in August 1967, Mary said "I wouldn't want the library to grow so large that it couldn't give the personal service I think is most important". Consequently, all the researchers have a specialist background in history, which is vital for finding those unexpected, slightly obscure, sometimes quirky pictures for which the library is known. To have grown so compellingly from a dedicated love of collecting pictures, and survived independently over forty years is no mean feat, but as Mary says 'Forty years of the library is nothing compared to the thousands of years of history in our files'.
Web: www.maryevans.com - www.bapla.org.uk
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