One Night VIP Exhibition in London - Event Recognises Sygma’s Move to a New World-Class Facility, Ensuring it Remains Safe and Accessible for Future Generations
London, UK, Oct. 17, 2007. Corbis, a creative resource for advertising, marketing and media professionals, last night celebrated its Sygma Preservation Initiative with a special event in London. Begun in 2004, the project will ensure the collections’ 50 million objects including slides, negatives, prints and contact sheets are carefully protected in new long-term home at an advanced, climate controlled preservation facility near Paris, while being brought to life and made more widely accessible.
The event, held at The Galleria in Pall Mall, included a selection of some of the most iconic images from the archive including intimate portraits of Alfred Hitchcock, Bob Dylan and Nelson Mandela, harrowing images of war in Chechnya, the Gulf and Rwanda and daring reportage of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre.
Two well known Sygma photographers, Richard Smith, winner of the BBC Young Photographer of the Year, and Orde Eliasson, founder of Link Photography, were in attendance for the evening.
“Corbis is committed to investing in the preservation of the profoundly important Sygma archive, one of the greatest collections of photojournalism in the world and an invaluable historical record of many momentous events from the past half century,” said Stefan Biberfeld, Senior Corporate Council, EMEA, who is overseeing the Sygma Preservation and Access Initiative. “We were proud to recognise the preservation and access work that is being undertaken with a special one night exhibition in London.”
As part of its work with Sygma, Corbis is collaborating with Locarchives, a proven specialist in archiving and document management, who will build the new “living” archive dedicated specifically to the Sygma collection. It will be located in Garnay, approximately 45 minutes outside Paris, making it easily accessible for photographers, researchers, historians, iconographers and others professionals interested in consulting the archives in person.
The eight hundred square meter facility will have approximately seven thousand meters of shelving in a climate controlled, airtight environment with advanced fire safety and security protections.
Since 2005, a dedicated team of Corbis editors and archivists has been undertaking the initial phases of the "Sygma Preservation and Access Initiative" leading up to the move of the collection. This has involved changing the archive classification system to classify pictures by photographer rather than by theme to regularize royalties, promote the collection and make it accessible to the public via the digitalization of prints.
Next, since the imagery within the Sygma collection is the property of each photographer, Corbis has been contacting the more than 10,000 contributors to offer them an archive agreement confirming that they wish to participate in the archiving and commercial development of their works.
Lastly, Corbis is collaborating closely with the photographers to bring the collection to life by searching, identifying and digitizing the most significant photos from the collection to be available via the Corbis website. Since 2002, Corbis has digitized more than 55,000 pictures to bring the total number available online to 800,000 from the collection.
The Sygma archive is comprised of nine separate collections of unique photos from the second half of the 20th century. The 1950s and 1960s imagery includes photography from Apis, Universal Photo, Interpress, Spitzer, Reporter Associés and other agencies. The collections from the 1970s and beyond includes the prestigious photojournalism, news, magazines, celebrities and portraits from the Sygma photo agency, as well as television and movie set imagery from Kipa, and sporting events from Tempsport.
About Corbis
Corbis is a creative resource for advertising, marketing and media professionals worldwide, helping to bring creative work to life with the highest quality photography, footage and rights services. Corbis offers a preeminent collection of more than 100 million creative, entertainment and historic images, a comprehensive footage library, the world's deepest rights and clearances expertise and an award-winning media management solution, as well as empowering SnapVillage, an innovative microstock web site. Based in Seattle, Corbis serves more than 50 countries worldwide. For more information, visit www.corbis.com.
Comments