Shutterstock Acquires Iconic Imagery from The Kobal Collection and The Art Archive

Delivering a collection of images that documents over 100 years of cinema history and archival art dating back 5000 years

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Shutterstock, Inc.

Sep 06, 2016, 09:00 ET

NEW YORK, Sept. 6, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Shutterstock, Inc. (NYSE: SSTK), a leading global provider of imagery and music, today announced the acquisition of over 700,000 images from two prominent photo collections: The Art Archive and The Kobal Collection. Both collections, previously held by UK-based The Picture Desk, are now available to Shutterstock Premier customers globally.

Shutterstock Acquires Iconic Imagery from The Kobal Collection and The Art Archive

"The Art Archive and Kobal Collection immortalize some of the finest works of art, ancient historic events and over 100 years of iconic cinematic legends," said Ben Pfeifer, Senior Vice President of Business Development at Shutterstock. "These collections are the cornerstone of our archival art and entertainment offering and include images ranging from the Mona Lisa to vintage Marilyn Monroe. They represent a unique wealth of rare images which are invaluable for book publishing, documentaries or creative projects."

The world-renowned Kobal Collection, originally conceived from one man's passion, preserves irreplaceable behind the scenes stills, portraits, and original posters issued by movie studios since the early days of cinema. The archive covers over a century of cinema from the very first silent films to today's latest Hollywood releases and international productions. Kobal Collection's portrait collection is famed for personifying the great romantic leads and the dazzling icons of the past such as Grace Kelly, Bette Davis, Marlon Brando and Richard Burton.

The Art Archive is a rare and extensive selection of expertly photographed images gathered over many years from the world's leading fine art galleries, museums, and private collections. The artistic breadth of the collection includes thousands of years' worth of ancient civilizations, paintings, historical figures, architecture, religion and science. Covering every aspect of the creative arts and world culture from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics dating back to 2500 BC to Buzz Aldrin's first steps on the moon in the 20th century, the famous and the infamous are all represented in this collection.

The Picture Desk archive on Shutterstock will introduce over 50 years' worth of careful image curation to journalists, creatives, educators and students all over the world who are searching for high-quality historical content.

Learn more about Kobal Collection here and the Art Archive here.

About Shutterstock, Inc.
Shutterstock, Inc. (NYSE:SSTK), is a leading global provider of high-quality licensed photographs, vectors, illustrations, videos and music to businesses, marketing agencies and media organizations around the world. Working with its growing community of over 140,000 contributors, Shutterstock adds hundreds of thousands of high quality images each week, and currently has more than 90 million images and 5 million video clips available.

Headquartered in New York City, with offices in Amsterdam, Berlin, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, London, Los Angeles, Montreal, Paris, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley, Shutterstock has customers in more than 150 countries. The company also owns Bigstock, a value-oriented stock media agency; Offset, a high-end image collection; PremiumBeat, a curated royalty-free music library; Rex Features, a premier source of editorial images for the world's media; and WebDAM, a cloud-based digital asset management service for businesses. For more information, please visit www.shutterstock.com and follow Shutterstock on Twitter and on Facebook.