The agency was founded in New York City at 250 Park Avenue in November 1935 by Leon Daniel and Celia Kutschuk.
Born in Ukraine, Kutschuk had studied photojournalism at Rhine University, and both had worked as picture editors at the Associated Press office in Berlin, which was headed by American Louis Lochner from 1928 until 1941, when Germany and the United States declared war and Lochner was held and then deported as an enemy alien.
[1] PIX acted as an intermediary between émigré photographers and the American magazine and newspaper market, profiting from the development of photojournalism in the USA in the 1930s onwards.
Lawrence Fried (1926–1983), a World War II veteran, worked steadily as a photo-journalist for The Saturday Evening Post, The New York Times, Vogue, Collier's, and Parade Magazine with over 70 covers for Newsweek.
The Spaarnestad collection in the National Archives of The Netherlands in The Hague contains photos distributed by PIX to Dutch publishing companies.