Bettmann archive
The Bettmann Archive is a collection of images and photos that was founded by Otto Bettmann and has been owned by Unity Glory, a company of the Chinese Visual China Group, since 2016, with around 11 million images.
founding
When the cultural historian Bettmann had to emigrate from Germany to the USA in 1935, he had the basis of a picture and photo collection with him, with which he founded a picture agency in New York City in 1936 . In 1938 it already had 15,000 pictures. They sold their rights of use with a one-time license to the editorial offices of newspapers, magazines and TV, as well as to book editors and the advertising industry. Bettmann's entrepreneurial achievement consisted in the development of this business model as well as the purchase and indexing of the rapidly growing stocks.
In 1967 Bettmann bought the Gendreau collection and in 1972 the Underwood & Underwood collection; By 1980 the archive had grown to two million images. In 1981 Bettmann sold the archive to the Kraus-Thomson Organization . From 1995 to 2015, the Bettmann Archive belonged to Corbis , the world's second largest image archive, founded by Bill Gates . Since then, the archive has been in Chinese ownership.
storage
Since 2002, the archive's holdings have been stored in the Iron Mountain National Underground Storage Facility in Boyers , Pennsylvania , a former limestone quarry, where the originals are largely safe from deterioration at a depth of 67 m at a temperature of −20 ° C.
Content examples
The best-known pictures in the Bettmann Archive include the picture of Albert Einstein showing his tongue, pictures of the catastrophe of the Hindenburg airship in 1937 and a picture of the first conquerors of Mount Everest , Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay .
Fictional mention
The future of this storage facility and its eventual destruction after a fictional disappearance of mankind is shown in episode 5 of the 2nd season of the docu-fiction series Future Without People (“Collapse Risk”, USA 2010).
literature
- Susanne Mendack: A photography Treasure. (The legendary Bettmann archive). = Treasury of photography. Feymedia-Verlags-Gesellschaft, Düsseldorf 2009, ISBN 978-3-941459-04-5 .
Web links
- Bettmann archive at Corbis
- Monika Idems: Bettmann Archive - Treasury of Photography . Review in: Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung , from December 20, 2009, with picture examples.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Company of the Visual China Group takes over assets from Corbis Images Businesswire January 22, 2016