London, 1986.

Panos Pictures took its name from the organisation it grew out of. Wikipedia says the agency began in London in 1986 as a small, independent, for-profit photo agency specialising in environmental issues. It was founded, and partly owned, by the charity Panos London, the London office of the Panos Institute, and it was built out of that organisation’s photo archive. The word “Panos” was the name of the parent body before it was the name of a picture agency.

The London journalists’ venue the Frontline Club marked the agency’s quarter-century with a talk titled In the Picture: 25 years of Panos Pictures on 25 April 2012. Its event page described Panos Pictures as having operated for 25 years as the commercial arm of the development NGO the Panos Institute, by then called Panos London, with photographers focused on social and development stories around the world.

The agency’s subject matter widened from its environmental start. Wikipedia now describes Panos Pictures as specialising in stories about global social issues for international media and NGOs, using both photography and video, and says it also produces exhibitions and long-term documentary projects.

The parent organisation changed later. Wikipedia says Panos London closed in 2013, and that the Panos Institute, described as a sister organisation of the agency, was renamed Panos Network, a network of five member institutes. Wikipedia describes Panos Pictures as a photo agency based in London, still under the name it took in 1986.

A director who started as a graphic designer.

The agency’s modern shape is tied to one person. Wikipedia says Adrian Evans joined Panos Pictures as director in 1990 and spent five years overseeing its expansion, and that as of September 2015 he was its director with a controlling share in the company. A 2023 biography published by the BarTur photography competition gives more detail: it says Evans joined in 1990 as Archive Director and bought a controlling stake in the agency in 1997.

Evans came to pictures by way of design. The same 2023 biography says he worked as a freelance graphic designer for three years before moving into photography at the Hutchison picture archive, and a biography on the World Photography Organisation’s website also lists graphic design among his early jobs. That World Photography Organisation biography describes Panos Pictures in 1990 as a small agency specialising in environmental issues, and says Evans spent five years there overseeing its expansion. The BarTur biography also says that as director he has produced large-scale projects with subjects ranging from professional cycling in Belgium to modern slavery in Britain, and that he has lectured at the London College of Communication, the University of Westminster and the London School of Economics.

At the 2012 Frontline Club talk, chaired by the photographer and lecturer Paul Lowe, Evans described the agency’s editorial stance. A write-up of the evening by Helena Williams on the club’s blog quotes him saying “We like to poke around in corners other people don’t go,” and that the agency steps aside from the main news to pursue stories when they are not under the media spotlight. The write-up describes Panos as working somewhere between the profit and non-profit worlds.

The agency also organises its photographers into tiers. Wikipedia says Panos Pictures represents a core group of photographers, called Panos Profile, more comprehensively than a wider group it calls Panos Network. The photographers Andrew Testa and Chloe Dewe Mathews spoke alongside Evans at the 2012 talk; the Frontline Club’s event page says Dewe Mathews joined Panos Pictures in 2011.

Credits, captions and a borrowed name.

Photo agencies and design magazines are brands whose product is other people’s work, and that shapes how their identities are built. The name usually arrives first as a wordmark or masthead: a short set of letters that has to sit above a changing cover image, on a spine, on a website header and in a social-media avatar without competing with the picture or the typography it frames. Many mastheads are redrawn when a new art director arrives, so the same title can carry several versions of its name over its life.

For agencies, the credit line is a quieter but constant brand surface. A photographer’s name followed by the agency’s name appears beside images in newspapers, books and exhibitions, so the agency name has to work in a few plain words of caption type as well as in a logo. Agencies organised as cooperatives or collectives often choose short, neutral names that can represent a group of members rather than a single founder.

For magazines, each cover is a new test of the identity, and the website and archive pages have become a second front cover. Consistent spacing, a stable masthead position and a restrained colour system let the content change while the brand stays recognisable.

Books, calendars and exhibitions, dated.

Outside news pages, the Panos Pictures name also appears on the covers of books and on gallery walls. Wikipedia lists a run of Amnesty International publications credited “Photos by Panos Pictures” and published in New York by Universe: Celebrating Human Dignity and Freedom in 2010, followed by wall calendars for 2013 and 2015, published in 2012 and 2014, and a weekly planner for 2015. In each case the agency name, rather than an individual photographer’s, sits in the credit line.

Exhibitions carry the same group credit. Wikipedia records Coffee and Cafes at the Society Café in Bath from 27 March 2012, with work by Panos photographers including Adam Hinton, Mark Henley and George Georgiou. It says Call the World Brother ran at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre from 23 May to 14 July 2013, coinciding with The Eye International Photography Festival and presenting 25 years of Panos Pictures, with photographers including GMB Akash, Robin Hammond and Espen Rasmussen; Wikipedia’s list for that show also names Dewe Mathews, Chris Keulen, Andrew McConnell, Martin Roemers and Stephan Vanfleteren. It also lists #FutureofCities at Somerset House in London from 24 April to 10 May 2015.

The anniversary itself was marked in public. The Frontline Club’s April 2012 event page set out the format: Lowe in conversation with Evans, Testa and Dewe Mathews about changes at Panos and in photojournalism over 25 years. The club’s write-up of the night says the evening showed work by Testa and Dewe Mathews. A recorded version, Conversations in Photography: 25 years of Panos Pictures, is linked from the agency’s Wikipedia entry.

For a design guide, Panos Pictures shows how a business can keep the name of the organisation it came from long after the two have separated. Compare VII, a photographers’ agency launched in 2001, and Agence VU, a Paris agency in this collection. For this guide we use field green, archive ochre and black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Panos Pictures’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.