Hulton Archive

Picture Post

Cover of the Picture Post vol. 8 no. 12 dated 21 September 1940
Editor	Tom Hopkinson
Former editors	Stefan Lorant
Staff writers	MacDonald Hastings, Lorna Hay, Sydney Jacobson, J. B. Priestley, Lionel Birch, James Cameron, Fyfe Robertson, Anne Scott-James, Robert Kee, and Bert Lloyd
Categories	Current affairs; photojournalism
Frequency	weekly
Circulation	1,950,000 copies a week in 1943
Publisher	Sir Edward G Hulton
First issue	1938
Final issue	1957
Country	United Kingdom
Based in	London
Language	English

Picture Post was a photojournalistic magazine published in the United Kingdom from 1938 to 1957. It is considered a pioneering example of photojournalism and was an immediate success, selling 1,700,000 copies a week after only two months. It has been called the UK's equivalent of Life magazine.

The magazine’s editorial stance was liberal, anti-Fascist and populist and from its inception Picture Post campaigned against the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. In the 26 November 1938 issue a picture story was run entitled "Back to the Middle Ages": photographs of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring were contrasted with the faces of those scientists, writers and actors they were persecuting.

In January 1941 the Post published their "Plan for Britain". This included minimum wages throughout industry, full employment, child allowances, a national health service, the planned use of land and a complete overhaul of education. This document led to discussions about post-war Britain and was a populist forerunner of William Beveridge's November 1942 Report.

Sales of Picture Post increased further during World War II and by December 1943 the magazine was selling 1,950,000 copies a week. By the end of 1949 circulation had declined to 1,422,000.

Founding editor Stefan Lorant (who had also founded Lilliput and had even earlier pioneered the picture-story in Germany in the 1920s) had been succeeded by (Sir) Tom Hopkinson in 1940. Lorant, who had some Jewish ancestry, had been imprisoned by Hitler in the early 1930s, and wrote a best-selling book thereafter, I Was Hitler's Prisoner. By 1940, he feared he would be captured in a Nazi invasion of Britain, and fled to Massachusetts, USA, where he wrote important illustrated U. S. histories and biographies. During World War Two, the art editor of the magazine, Edgar Ainsworth, served as a war correspondent and accompanied the American 7th Army on their advance across Europe in 1945. He visited the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp three times after the British army liberated the complex in April 1945. Several of his sketches and drawings from the camp were published in a September 1945 article, Victim and Prisoner. Ainsworth also commissioned the artist Mervyn Peake to visit France and Germany at the end of the war, and he too reported from Bergen-Belsen.