THE:Theatre to PHO:Photography: Billie Love and Anna Shepherd in the Picture Library

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Event

Start Date

8-3-2026 2:52 PM

Description

This paper looks at the work of photographer Billie Love (1923-2012) and her partner Anna Shepherd, a former picture researcher, and their picture library business the Billie Love Historical Picture Library located in their shared home on the Isle of Wight, UK. Love started her career as a stage actress before taking up photography in the early 1950s. She specialised in theatre portraits, taking pictures of notable twentieth-century film and television performers. Love operated under the name of ‘Amanda’ and ran a successful portrait studio in London. Shepherd worked as a picture librarian and researcher at the BBC’s Hulton Picture Library. In the 1960s Love and Shepherd started collecting historical photographs and the couple set up their own picture library business after Shepherd was made redundant when the Hulton Library closed in 1988. The Billie Love Historical Picture Library grew to be an esoteric collection, which combined images taken by Love with a broad variety of nineteenth and twentieth century photographic images. Through the twentieth century picture libraries were largely staffed by women and their work was undervalued. The paper explores what it meant for two gay women to run their own picture library business and bring to it their skills as a photographer and picture researcher. Love and Shepherd collected and curated a photographic collection that included figures from the canonical history of photography, such as William Henry Fox Talbot, alongside images of and by themselves. The paper considers how these women represented themselves in a history of photography that didn’t otherwise reflect LGBTQ+ people.

Francesca Issatt is Curator of Photography and Photographic Technology at the National Science and Media Museum, Bradford (UK). She has worked with photography collections in museums and archives for the last 10 years. Francesca recently completed her PhD titled Women and architectural photography in Britain, 1920-1939 at Birkbeck College (University of London) and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Her research looked at photographic societies, education, and publishing to explore how gender expectations, societal changes, and fraternalism shaped amateur and professional architectural photography by women in interwar Britain.

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Mar 8th, 2:52 PM

THE:Theatre to PHO:Photography: Billie Love and Anna Shepherd in the Picture Library

This paper looks at the work of photographer Billie Love (1923-2012) and her partner Anna Shepherd, a former picture researcher, and their picture library business the Billie Love Historical Picture Library located in their shared home on the Isle of Wight, UK. Love started her career as a stage actress before taking up photography in the early 1950s. She specialised in theatre portraits, taking pictures of notable twentieth-century film and television performers. Love operated under the name of ‘Amanda’ and ran a successful portrait studio in London. Shepherd worked as a picture librarian and researcher at the BBC’s Hulton Picture Library. In the 1960s Love and Shepherd started collecting historical photographs and the couple set up their own picture library business after Shepherd was made redundant when the Hulton Library closed in 1988. The Billie Love Historical Picture Library grew to be an esoteric collection, which combined images taken by Love with a broad variety of nineteenth and twentieth century photographic images. Through the twentieth century picture libraries were largely staffed by women and their work was undervalued. The paper explores what it meant for two gay women to run their own picture library business and bring to it their skills as a photographer and picture researcher. Love and Shepherd collected and curated a photographic collection that included figures from the canonical history of photography, such as William Henry Fox Talbot, alongside images of and by themselves. The paper considers how these women represented themselves in a history of photography that didn’t otherwise reflect LGBTQ+ people.

Francesca Issatt is Curator of Photography and Photographic Technology at the National Science and Media Museum, Bradford (UK). She has worked with photography collections in museums and archives for the last 10 years. Francesca recently completed her PhD titled Women and architectural photography in Britain, 1920-1939 at Birkbeck College (University of London) and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Her research looked at photographic societies, education, and publishing to explore how gender expectations, societal changes, and fraternalism shaped amateur and professional architectural photography by women in interwar Britain.