Our visual history is disappearing

Washington Post

10-03-2025

Kira Pollack, a former editor at Time and Vanity Fair, is a distinguished fellow at the Starling Lab for Data Integrity, a research lab co-anchored by Stanford University's School of Engineering and USC Libraries.
When Hurricane Milton threatened Tampa last October, photojournalist Christopher Morris faced a familiar challenge: protecting his archive from destruction. For days, he lifted folders of photographs onto 10-foot-high shelves inside his home while also rolling metal filing cabinets into a U-Haul in his driveway — to keep his archive above the storm surges. His life's work — hundreds of thousands of photographs, negatives and digital files taken over decades — hung in the balance. When the storm veered south, sparing his home, Morris knew he had narrowly escaped catastrophe. 'I can't keep gambling with it year after year,' Morris said. 'I have to find a solution.'
Morris's dilemma is not unusual. His work and countless other photographic archives like it represent our collective visual history. Institutions such as the Library of Congress, which holds 16 million images, play a crucial role in preserving photojournalism, yet the surge of at-risk archives far exceeds anyone's capacity. Adam Silvia, a photography curator at the library, usually receives two or three inquiries each month from photographers or their estates hoping to place a lifetime of work, but only a fraction can be accepted. The library holds just 12 complete archives of individual photojournalists. And there are many more photos than places to house them, digitize them and make them publicly available.
Washington Grays baseball players in D.C.'s Griffith Stadium in 1947. (Robert H. McNeill Family Collection/Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division)
Fashion models pose in a swimming pool in 1948. (Toni Frissell Photograph Collection/Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division) Steve Jobs with an Apple computer in 1984. (Bernard Gotfryd Photograph Collection/Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division)
Despite the meticulous organization of her own archive, photographer Donna Ferrato, known for her work on domestic violence, has yet to find a home for it. 'It's the curse of the living photographer,' she says. 'The older we get, the more we understand the value of every single photograph that connects us to a human being from our past.'
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Without a clear plan, a photographer's archive can become a burden rather than a legacy, leaving heirs — spouses, children or executors — to navigate complex decisions about storage, access and preservation. Ruth Orkin, best known for 'American Girl in Italy' — a striking 1951 photograph of a young woman striding through a Florentine street as men turn to look — ensured her archive would be in the secure hands of her daughter, Mary Engel. But even with that preparation, Engel faced a steep learning curve as she took on the task when her mother died. Seeing how many others were in the same position, she founded the American Photography Archives Group in 2000. What began as a small peer network has since grown into a nonprofit with nearly 300 members, assisting both living photographers, such as Pete Souza, and the estates of legends such as Ansel Adams, Lee Miller, Elliott Erwitt, and André Kertész.
The first meeting of Vice President Richard Nixon and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., on March 6, 1957, in Accra, Ghana. (Griff Davis/Griffith J. Davis Photographs and Archives)
'American Girl in Italy,' Florence, 1951. (Copyright 1952, 1980 Ruth Orkin) (Ruth Orkin/Ruth Orkin Photo Archive)
British women pose by a London air-raid shelter in 1941. (Lee Miller/Lee Miller Archives) John F. Kennedy prepares a speech in Baltimore as admirers watch in September 1960. (Paul Schutzer)
As photographers try to find homes for their work, traditional archives are also vanishing, especially in local journalism, where generations of photographers built shared visual records of community history. Newspaper photo morgues — once vast collections housed in newsroom attics and basements — have been disappearing at an alarming rate as publications downsize, shut down or sell off their buildings. Copyright law adds another hurdle: Though independent photographers own their work, staff images typically belong to the publications, leaving photographers unable to reclaim their own archives. Some photographers have resorted to dumpster diving — I know one who salvaged his box of negatives from the trash.
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Institutions can help. In 2019, a powerhouse alliance of the J. Paul Getty Trust, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Ford, Mellon and MacArthur foundations rescued Johnson Publishing Company's archive from bankruptcy — and more than 4 million photographs from magazines including Ebony and Jet that captured postwar Black American life. Among the collection's images is Moneta Sleet Jr.'s photograph of Coretta Scott King, veiled in black, holding her daughter Bernice at her husband's funeral. The picture won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, the first to be awarded to a Black photographer.
Coretta Scott King consoles her daughter, Bernice, at the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968. (Moneta Sleet Jr./Johnson Publishing Company Archive/Courtesy J. Paul Getty Trust and Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture)
Poet and activist Maya Angelou relaxes in her room before performing at New York's Village Vanguard. (G. Marshall Wilson/Ebony Collection/Johnson Publishing Company Archive/Courtesy J. Paul Getty Trust and Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture)
The Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott in 1956. (William Lanier/Ebony Collection/Johnson Publishing Company Archive/Courtesy J. Paul Getty Trust and Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture)
Johnson Publishing's massive Chicago-based archive is being catalogued by a team of archivists, with plans for a permanent home at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. The Getty Trust is applying some of the most advanced technology available to curate the collection, but its effort is an exception to the rule.
Photographer Edward Burtynsky, known for his dramatic landscapes, has been pioneering a solution to one of the greatest challenges in preservation: scale. Burtynsky developed a high-tech scanner designed to digitize and catalogue images at an unprecedented rate — up to 2,000 per day. What used to take years can now take months. The system functions like a precision turntable, scanning both sides of prints simultaneously with high-resolution cameras and synchronized strobe lighting.
The customized scanning system known as ARKIV360 at Edward Burtynsky's Toronto studio. (Edward Burtynsky Photography/ARKIV360)
The ARKIV360 scanning system. (Edward Burtynsky Photography/ARKIV360)
Algorithms powered by artificial intelligence then extract handwritten notes, metadata and important details, organizes the information so each image can easily be searched by keywords and includes a clear description. So far, Burtynsky's team has digitized a vast collection of images about Canada for the Image Center, a photography museum in Toronto, and 89,000 First Nations and Inuit drawings from the Toronto area's McMichael Canadian Art Collection. Next, they plan to take on the Black Star Collection — nearly 300,000 historic black-and-white prints at the Image Center. 'I call it unleashing history,' Burtynsky says. 'There's all this history that's locked up.'
The hurricanes Morris prepares for each season in Florida are a tangible threat, but time and technological obsolescence are inexorable. The photographers of our era took the great risks to create these vital documents of history. We risk losing not just the images but also our ability to bear witness to history itself.