Marine Photography

Ajax News & Feature Service was established in the early 1970s to service the editorial needs of publishers with words and photographs of events occurring in the maritime world. It was the first such specialist agency of its kind, its picture library built on the existing work of photojournalist Jonathan Eastland who took up the camera professionally in 1966 after a short career in the British Merchant Navy.

In the decades since it was formed, Ajax News & Feature Service has evolved into a major supplier of images and words to the world's specialist marine, travel and photographic media. The picture library, which is fully digital, incorporates the Ajax News Photos and Ajax Vintage Picture Library archives as well as several other important collections.

Ajax Vintage Library (AVL) was originally started as a hobby by Jonathan Eastland in the 1960s with a small collection of inherited early 20th century images. A large number of glass negative plates soon grew the collection; its importance as an archive of historical and academic interest enabled it to be incorporated into the main library. In the decades since it was established this section has grown to contain thousands of images of maritime and social life dating back to 1858. The library's most recent acquisition is the Vosper Thornycroft Shipbuilding archive covering more than a century of small and large ship construction at sites on the Thames and at Woolston in Southampton. Other collections include Reg Calvert's work made in the Caribbean Islands in the 1950s and 60s, and the Viv Townley aviation archive from the 1960s and 70s.

Contemporary works in the library date from the 1960s and cover a vast range of topics. The main subject headings are available in list form. The majority of images contained in this section of the picture library are by Jonathan Eastland, an award winning photographer and the author of several books on marine and photography subjects. The Picture Archive is added to daily with images available in digital form.

We have endeavoured to make on-site searches as painless as possible, so in addition to the normal keyword search facility, The Ajaxnetphoto.com Picture Library offers visitors the convenient drop-down subject category menu for rapid viewing of thumbnail and preview images.