Alessandro's Pics

1. What is your role at Bridgeman?

As Sales Director for Bridgeman's flagship London office, I am responsible for overseeing all aspects of the company’s sales team and customer service.This includes developing our sales strategy and drafting contracts for new partners.

2. What do you love most about the job? 

I love the fact that with my team, we are constantly in touch with different cultures. In one day, I might be attending a conference call with Japan, discussing our sales strategy with a partner in Brazil, or helping a Scandinavian client with his project. What I find amazing is that, despite the cultural differences, we seem to be always able to find images in our archive that suit our clients' needs.

3. What misconceptions do clients most commonly have about the archive?

Many international clients associate Bridgeman with British imagery. What surprisingly few clients realise is how international our archive has become. Bridgeman represents many times more collections in the US than any other image archive, and we also represent some of the most important international museums such as the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum, the National Gallery of Australia and the Swedish National Art Museum, just to name a few.

We try to collect some of the most interesting uses on our website, but it is impossible to give an account of the range of projects our images have been used for. The only limit is clients’ creativity!

1. Paolo Uccello

Rather than the image itself, it is the artist that captivates me. Vasari described him as “endowed by nature with a penetrating and subtle mind, [he] knew no other delight than to investigate […] impossible problems of perspective”. What Vasari saw as a limit, is the aspect that fascinates me in Uccello’s art. Every time I see one of his paintings, I can’t help but wonder how many hours the man spent trying to get the perspective right.

2. Agnolo Bronzino

This is one of the most ambiguous and striking paintings of the Italian Mannerist movement and object of endless discussion between art historians for its interpretation. The first time I saw it at the National Gallery I remember staring at it for a good 30 minutes, absorbed in the impossible task of deciphering its intricate symbolism. Still today, every time I see this image, I look for new hidden meanings.

3. Egon Schiele

I have a soft spot for Viennese Secession and Egon Schiele is probably my favourite artist of that movement. Schiele is often remembered for his explicit artistic language, however this portrait shows another characteristic of his art: a tender and profound humanity.

4. Dorothea Lange

Photographer and documentarist, Dorothea Lange had a rare talent for capturing the atmosphere of an era in a single shot. This poignant portrait is rightly considered one of her best photos and became a symbol for the Great Depression. I came across this image for the first time few years ago when doing research for a client and it immediately became one of my favourite in the archive.

5. Animal Farm

Bridgeman is proud to represent Halas & Batchelor footage collection and we can now license clips from the iconic animated movie “Animal Farm”. I read 1984 when I was 15 years old and it is not an exaggeration to say that it shocked me. After that, I went straight into reading “Animal Farm” which reinforced my admiration for Orwell. In this clip, the animals discover the sentence “all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others”, which seems to be still very much as true today as it was 60 years ago.