Next year, 2013, sees the 100th anniversary of Benjamin Britten’s birth and there are numerous events organised by the Britten-Pears Foundation  taking place to commemorate this great English composer and his work.

Within the archive at Report, there are a great many photos of Britten taken in the mid to late 1950’s by Kurt Hutton, a German born photographer whose original name had been Kurt Hubschmann.

Hutton, like Robert Capa after him, had worked with Simon Guttmann at Dephot in Berlin in Weimar Germany. Hutton fled Germany in 1934 and arrived in Great Britain where he re-established his working relationship with Guttmann, who himself arrived in London around 1946, at the conclusion of the Second World War. For the last decade of his life, Kurt Hutton lived in Aldeburgh, which is why he came to document so much of Benjamin Britten’s life.

© Report Archive. Kurt Hutton at work.

Whilst searching for Hutton’s photos – which were found along with many of the original negatives! – I also came across this wonderful portrait of him, see above,  which I doubt has ever been published before; as well as a few of his original prints scanned here, see below, presumably taken around the same time as he was photographing Benjamin Britten as he prepared for the Aldeburgh Festival. It’s quite likely that this is the first time these images have also been published as, with the exception of the photo of Noye’s Flood, none of these images appear anywhere on the internet.

© Report Archive/Kurt Hutton

© Report Archive/Kurt Hutton

© Report Archive/Kurt Hutton Noye’s Flood.

Further research into what is contained within Hutton’s negatives will take a little while longer, but finding these prints alone is proof that the Report/IFL archive has many jewels within its copyrighted crown.