Gelatin-silver print, black and white photograph of French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot, by Lucien Aigner (1901-1999), 1932

Very dark black and white photograph of a man, Herriot, on the phone, pointing in front of him. Only his face and hand are picked out from the shadows.

Given by John and Judith Hillelson

This photograph was one of a collection given to the V&A by John and Judith Hillelson. One of the most important picture agents in post-war Britain, John Hillelson established his agency in London in 1958 and acted as the UK representative of Magnum photographers and later the French agencies Viva and Sygma until the early 1990s. During the 1950s and '60s he collaborated with a new generation of weekly and fashion magazine editors to publish photostories by Magnum photographers and gain exposure for less-known work, such as the pictures of apartheid smuggled out of South Africa by Ernest Cole in 1966-7. As photography gained institutional recognition in the 1970s and '80s and the market for photographic prints grew, Hillelson also started to collect and represent the work of the first generation of photojournalists - including Erich Salomon and Lucien Aigner - whose pictures had been so widely published in the 1930s. The selection of photographs from the agency's archive now in the V&A's collection thus forms an incredibly rich and diverse record of some of the best photojournalism from the 1930s to the 1980s.

E.273-2003