I took a big step forwards a few weeks ago. I decided to post some of the photographs of Josef Jakobs onto Alamy, one of the stock photo websites. There are a number of different stock photography sites; places like Shutterstock, Pixabay, Unsplash, iStock, Getty and Alamy. I chose Alamy because they have a section for archival photographs. I might get them onto Getty at some point. We’ll see how things go with Alamy.
One of the reasons why I made this move was because I often get asked if I could share a photograph of Josef at high resolution – either for websites or news organizations or journalists or authors. I usually say, “no problem, just acknowledge credit for the photograph”. But it’s easy to lose track of these permissions. So, I thought… why not try Alamy.
I scoured through our Jakobs Family photo album and scanned a few example photographs at lower resolution and sent them off to Alamy. While anyone can upload regular photographs to Alamy, uploading archival photographs requires permission. It took about a month, but permission came through! The only quality criteria was that the photographs needed to be a 5 MB uncompressed JPEG file.
I sat down and scanned about two dozen photographs from the photo album: Josef as a child, as a teen, as a soldier in the First World War, his wedding photographs, and several photographs from his time in Switzerland.
After scanning some of the Switzerland photographs, it became clear that the photographer (Josef’s wife, Margarete) was perhaps not the best photographer. Some photographs seemed blurry or back-lit or were just too far away. So the two dozen shrank down to about a dozen.
I learned a LOT about Alamy’s back-end and scrounged around for 50 keywords or tags that I could attach to the photographs. All of which enhance “discoverability”. It’s a bit of a pitch into the unknown but… you never know. There are other photographs, but these are enough for now.
As I scrutinized the photographs of Josef and his wife in Switzerland, however, I came across a rather startling one that made me stop and pause. It’s a very clear, in-focus photograph of Josef dressed in a natty pin-striped suit with a trilby hat on his head. A pin-striped suit? Trilby hat? Wait? Wasn’t that what he was wearing under his parachute outfit when he landed in Huntingdonshire on 31 January 1941?
I dug around in the digital MI5 files and found the report from Acting Inspector Horace Jaikens of the Huntingdonshire Constabulary, after the capture of Josef in a field near Ramsey.
(National Archives, KV 2/24, folio 20b, page 2)
Josef was indeed wearing a grey-striped lounge suite as well as a blue trilby hat when he landed in England. Could the suit that Josef is seen wearing in 1934 Switzerland be the same one that he was wearing when he landed in 1941 England? Possible? Maybe.
Whether it is the same suit or not, the photograph gives us an excellent idea of what Josef would have looked like had he emerged from the parachute landing unscathed.
I ran the Alamy black and white photograph through a colorizer (Palette.fm) just out of curiosity and… it is quite stunning. It’s always amazing to me how colour photographs bring things to life. Sooo different from black and white or sepia tones.
The black and white photograph is available on Alamy.
Photographs on Alamy
Here’s the link for the current portfolio of Josef Jakobs photographs on Alamy.
References/Credits
I used Palette.fm to colourize the photograph of Josef