By Michael Miner
Which is why the 17 million photographs and negatives that make up the Bettmann Archive will be buried this fall in a former limestone mine in western Pennsylvania–a cool, dry, dark place where the pictures will survive for centuries, though possibly at the expense of the here and now.
The argument raged. A second filer called Gates a “predator” and surmised that he’s burying the archive “to drive up the leasing/usage price of his photographs…by making them scarce.” A third said the storage problems are indisputable and, “rightly or wrongly, Corbis believes it has a solution.” Yet another filer said Gates “has the vision to realize the value, as we do, of all those photos and is willing and able to step up to the plate and do something about it.”
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What about bombs?
Yet I imagine a legislator holding forth in Springfield two centuries from now, demanding to know why the taxpayers’ money is being spent to preserve a heap of ancient negatives and prints known only to a handful of scholars.
Ten days later Zorn wrote that Protess’s students were “picking apart the prosecution’s case in public even before a jury has heard it.” For instance, they’d videotaped an interview with a neighbor of Sykes’s who said that if Sykes had come and gone that January morning, he would have heard the door slamming.
