Sonic Editions founder Russell Blackmore tells the story of finding the archive, saying,
"We set off to find Iron Mountain - a former Limestone mine that had been converted to an underground archive storage facility - and without the GPS, we’d still be looking for it now. In between the low hills and scrubby woods of rural Pennsylvania we suddenly came across a car park and what looked like the gatehouse of a super-max prison. We walked up to the pedestrian entrance, were allowed through the first set of doors where a man behind a bulletproof glass screen asked to see two forms of photo ID. It all seemed slightly over the top until I glanced the rack of machine guns behind him, and the Baghdad Green-Zone facility for vehicle searches through the other side of the guardhouse window.
It turns out that this former limestone mine doesn’t just contain one of the world’s largest photo archives. It was set up in the 50s as a bunker for Pittsburgh’s heavy industry to move to in the event of nuclear attack. Inside the 1.7 million square feet of archives, over 2,000 companies keep everything from the latest server back ups to the major movie studios original celluloid of movies like ET, Jaws and Back to the Future, the master recordings of Sinatra, Elvis and Glen Miller, and Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation stores the video testimony of Holocaust survivors."
Check out the remainder of the prints and buy them here.
SHARE THIS STORY
