About

Stanley Bielecki was born to a Jewish mother and a Catholic father, in Lvov, then Poland (now Ukraine) in 1925. He was deported to Siberia at the outbreak of World War Two, where he remained until joining the Anders Army in 1942. After six years in Italy, where he found himself a refugee at the end of the war, he came to London and began his career as a photojournalist for the travel section of the Sunday Times. He opened his own photographic studio and lab, Avenue Studio Photographic at No 1, Addison Avenue, W11 in 1951.

For the next 15 years he worked for a panoply of magazines. From 1964-1966, he shot some of the major figures of the pop boom for titles like NME and Melody Maker, Pop Weekly and Teen Beat.

At the end of the 1960s, the lab became SB International, which specialized in film still photography and processed onset photos from major Hollywood films of the 70s and 80s, among them Alien, Star Wars and Superman.