Papers, photographs and newspaper cuttings on the work of F Percy Smith and his films on natural history subjects, 1908-1946. Part of Charles Urban Archive.
Album of photographs by F Percy Smith (Volume A, 1910). Images of nature including macrophotography of insects and parts of insects. (URB-8-4-1). Part of Charles Urban Archive.
Advertising poster entitled 'Fly Nurses a Miniature Doll', produced by 'The Daily Mirror' newspaper to advertise the film 'The Acrobatic Fly' by Percy Smith, printed 13 November 1908. Part of Charles Urban Archive.
'The Acrobatic Fly' (also known as 'The Balancing Bluebottle') is a 1910 British short silent documentary film, directed by F. Percy Smith, featuring close-ups of a housefly secured to the head of a match and juggling objects with its feet. The film, "is one of a series of Smith films on similar subjects around this time," and according to Mark Duguid of the BFI is, "near identical to, though briefer than, a sequence in his 1911 release The Strength and Agility of Insects.
A photograph of F Percy Smith at work, taken by Joan Woollcombe.
A photograph (silver gelatin print) on page 147 of F Percy Smith's scapbook showing F Percy Smith and his wife Kate working in their home laboratory, 6 May 1939. Taken by an unnamed photographer for Illustrated magazine.
Frank Percy Smith was a pioneer of nature photography, revealing the hidden lives of insects and plants in a way that people had never seen before. His close-up of the fly’s tongue as it drank was extraordinary. When film producer Charles Urban saw Smith’s close up photographs of flies drinking, he engaged him to make natural history films, which he continued to do for the next 35 years.
Smith worked with his wife Kate and their friend Phyllis Bolté in their home studio. They documented the growth of plants using time-lapse photography, so revealing the slow movements of plants for the first time.