Frank Selby
Hungarian émigré who, with his wife, founded and built up the famous Rex Features picture agency
FRANK SELBY, who has died aged 100, was co-founder with his wife Elizabeth of Rex Features, the picture agency which for six decades kept Fleet Street richly supplied with celebrity and royal photographs.
From small beginnings in the front room of their London house, the Selbys built a business respected throughout the print media world. They offered access to a physical archive of 15 million pictures and an online database of 6 million, to which thousands were added every day.
Countless photo-journalists – including paparazzi – depended on Rex not only for their livelihood but also for guidance as to what would sell best. For newspapers, the agency provided minute-by-minute solutions to the quest for the most striking and circulation-boosting images.
Rex’s leading position was consolidated by the shift to colour photographs in newspapers – and the increased demand that came with it for a constant supply of new images. The agency’s coverage of the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer won many new clients – and it was also first to offer pictures of the Prince with Camilla Parker Bowles.
Renowned Rex images ranged from early pictures of the Beatles to Elizabeth Taylor with Richard Burton, and Elizabeth Hurley in the Versace “safety-pin” dress that turbocharged her career. The stills libraries of television shows such as I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! were managed by Rex, and there were innumerable news “world exclusives”. Whatever the subject, the Selbys prided themselves on “fair dealing and good service”.
Frank Selby was born Ferenc Salusinszky in Budapest on January 12 1918. His forebears were Jewish shoemakers from Poland who had migrated to Hungary in the 19th century; his father Imre Salusinszky was editor-in-chief of the leading Hungarian newspaper Az Est. Ferenc left Hungary in 1936 to study law at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge; after interludes in Lausanne and Paris he returned to England in 1939, and in 1941 he joined the Pioneer Corps of the British Army, serving alongside other émigrés, including Arthur Koestler.
He first met Elizabeth in 1942, and married her in 1948; born in Berlin in 1925, she was the daughter of Heinrich (Henry) Guttmann, a native of the Carpatho-ukraine province of the Austro-hungarian empire and a writer and photographic collector. She worked for the Free French headquarters in London as a teenager during the war, afterwards joining her father to sell freelance articles with photographs from his offices in Maida Vale.
Guttman’s first archive of historic European photographs was sold to Picture Post in 1947, but he started another collection which he passed on to Frank and Elizabeth to develop their own venture. In 1954 they were asked to represent Lynx, a small Paris news agency, in the UK, and Rex Features was officially launched – with Elizabeth running the business from home while Frank went to Fleet Street to sell their wares.
In due course they moved to offices in Covent Garden, then close to Fleet Street itself – where in 1979 they recovered from a catastrophic fire. Later they occupied a Victorian school building in Clerkenwell which one regular visitor described as “like walking into a large family gathering rather than a place of work”.
The couple were joint managing directors of the firm until their retirement in 2008, as Frank entered his 10th decade. A takeover approach from the rival Getty Images having been barred by competition authorities, in 2011 Rex was bought out by its managers, supported by the Selby family as investors – and in 2015 it was sold for £22 million to Shutterstock in New York.
A stylish dresser with a lively sense of humour, Frank Selby celebrated his 100th birthday in January with a large crowd and a spectacular cake. He is survived by his wife and their children Michael, John and Sue, all of whom worked for Rex. Minutes before he died, his family revealed, he told Elizabeth how much he loved her.
Frank Selby, born January 12 1918, died February 17 2018