Freeze Frames

Roughly 200 feet beneath the earth’s surface in a former Pennsylvania limestone mine, it’s as cool as ever: -4 degrees Fahrenheit, with 35 percent relative humidity. The perfect climate for preserving photographic prints and negatives, according to Ken Johnston, and it’s his business to know. Johnston is manager of historical collections for Corbis, the Bill Gates- owned photo stock agency that in 1995 bought the world-renowned Bettmann Archive, which includes the United Press International collections and many of this century’s most enduring images— Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta, Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out, John Kennedy Jr. saluting his dead father. With the help of several experts, Corbis determined that the best way to preserve the 7.5 million originals was to move them out of Manhattan and into Iron Mountain National Underground Storage, a sort of underworld backup server for fragile analog content. The facility will be fully operational in April. “A few have suggested -4 is a little extreme,” Johnston says, “but film is organic, and it lasts longer frozen.”

Though photo researchers will still be able to visit the archives, the distance from New York has some worried that access may be sacrificed in the name of preservation. Corbis communications manager Marc Osborn insists that this concern is unfounded. Thanks to digital technologies, he says, prints from the archives will be more accessible than ever. Corbis has already scanned 225,000 of the 1.3 million most requested images in the collection (the remaining millions can be “scanned on demand”) and uploaded them so they’re available via the Web. It is also digitizing six card catalogs that were never before cross-referenced. True, for a more obscure image, you might have to wait a day for a glass plate to defrost. Still, Johnston says, ‘that’s a small price to pay so we can ensure there’s an image left to scan.”