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John Kobal (born Ivan Kobaly, 30 May 1940 – 28 October 1991) was an Austrian-born British based film historian responsible for The Kobal Collection, a commercial photograph library related to the film industry.

Kobal was born in Linz, Austria, but the family emigrated to Canada when Kobal was ten and settled in Ottawa.

Kobal had a short-lived career as an actor in the early 1960s based in London, but Kobal was always a collector; magazines, postcards, pictures, any movie memorabilia. It was a chance encounter with Marlene Dietrich in Canada in the 1950’s that led Kobal to develop his affection for the Golden Age of Hollywood. He used his contacts from a BBC appointment in New York from 1964 to acquire Hollywood related photographs, eventually numbering about 4,500 images dating from the end of the silent era to about 1960. The material was then considered of little value and regularly dumped.

The author of thirty books, Kobal was responsible for organising the first exhibition of Hollywood related photographs at London's Victoria and Albert Museum in 1974. The critic John Russell Taylor has described Kobal's contribution to film studies as "unique". Kobal died of AIDS-related pneumonia in London.

The John Kobal Foundation, to which he donated his collection, was established as a registered charity at the end of 1992 and presented an annual award in Portrait Photography between 1993 and 2002.

The Kobal Collection can be found at www.picture-desk.com. The collection is split between the London and New York offices of The Picture Desk and now consists of over 200,000 images. The Collection also continues the exhibition work begun by John Kobal, mounting several exhibitions commissioned by the International Festival du Film, Cannes, and prestigious department stores in Japan.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "John Kobal", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0