State of Affairs

Getty Images is the largest image bank in the world. Many defining images of the last century – images that form a part of our collective memory – only exist behind Getty’s paywall: the crash of the Hindenburg, the Apollo moon landings, the first breach of the Berlin Wall... The film is a study of property, profit, and power, made out of archive footage sourced from Getty’s online catalogue. It forms an impassioned and meticulously crafted journey through some of the most significant moments of historical change ever caught on camera, while at the same time reflecting on how commercial archives influence what we see. Through an intervention revealed at the end of the narrative, the film also forms a small but direct resistance to Getty’s privatization of the past.