The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2021–2022
Getty remakes extinct species from photos of endangered animals still alive
Getty's archive has no photos of animals that died before photography, so it rebuilt three of them from pictures of endangered animals alive today
Getty Images · AlmapBBDO
What it had to solve
Getty Images has millions of photographs in its archive, but some pictures can never be there: animals that went extinct before photography existed. The company wanted to raise awareness of sustainability among people and companies — above all its own clients, the agencies and brands that license imagery — while showing what its archive can express.
How it works
Getty Images holds millions of photographs, yet its archive has gaps no photo shoot can fill: species that vanished before photography existed were never captured on film. Living Images started from that hole in the collection rather than from a slogan.
Three never-photographed animals — the American lion, the Rodrigues giant tortoise and the great auk — were reconstructed using photos of animals in danger of extinction right now. On Getty's site, visitors could rotate each creature in 360 degrees, see every endangered-animal image used to build it, and read the extinct species' stories, illustrated with Getty photos and videos.
The message was built into the mechanism: these extinct animals could only be rebuilt out of photographs of endangered ones, so the pictures keeping the reconstruction alive are themselves at risk. The campaign spoke directly to agencies and brands — Getty's clients — citing Getty research that 81% of people surveyed globally expected companies to be environmentally aware in all their advertising.
Why it lands
- The creative engine was an absence: an image archive presenting the one picture it can never own argues the point more powerfully than a statistic.
- Every reconstructed animal was built only from photos of endangered species, so the warning was embedded in the construction itself.
- Showing the full set of source images made the digital reconstruction transparent and verifiable rather than a magic trick.
- The audience was Getty's own market — agencies and brands — so the campaign doubled as a demonstration of what its imagery can do.
What it did
The idea gave the archive pictures it could never own, and made that absence the message: many more species may disappear before anyone photographs them. The work appears in D&AD's awards archive and was a Digital Design merit winner at the One Show 2022.
What you can take
To sell an image library, show the image that cannot exist: take the gap in the archive itself and let it argue the cause — what is missing can be as eloquent as what is there.
Since then
Living Images launched as a campaign film, a making-of and an interactive website built around the 360-degree reconstructions. The campaign cited Getty research finding that 81% of people surveyed globally said companies should be environmentally aware in all their advertising and communication, which framed the work as a message from Getty to its own clients. D&AD's awards archive records the work, and the One Show 2022 listed it among its Digital Design merit winners.
Sources
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