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Nat Geo Mines Its Unpublished Archives for Precious Gems


al mcguire

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http://natgeofound.tumblr.com/

 

Along with earning a reputation for publishing some of the world’s finest photojournalism over the years, National Geographic has accrued a backlog of unpublished photos as vast as the Kalahari. To mark the Yellow Box’s 125th birthday this year, its editors launched a Tumblr to highlight some of its otherwise forgotten images.

Found is Nat Geo’s productivity-killing photostream, drawn from its sprawling archive of unpublished vintage prints.

“If we haven’t seen them, it’s likely that they aren’t known outside the offices of National Geographic,” says Web Barr, the young designer at Nat Geo who conceived of Found. “Figuring out a way to ‘lift the veil’ even a little bit was something I was determined to do.”

Whether the dreamlike sight of the Mayflower sailing into 1950s New York under the shadow of a looming zeppelin, or the turn-of-the-century visage of an African lion lit by flashlight in the savannah, every image has the air of a classic, and in many cases leaves one wondering how it failed to get published.

These stunning pictures, once buried in the photographic equivalent of anonymous graves, are now circulating in the social media trade winds to be shared, upvoted, reblogged or just nabbed for desktop wallpaper. To Barr, the choice of Tumblr was the obvious way to get pictures up and connected immediately to a built-in online community. Despite the hip platform, everything about the site remains a testament to National Geographic’s history, down to the header typeface lifted from old Society maps.

“In the way that Instagram is our real-time feed from our photographers in the field, we felt Found could be a feed from our past,” Barr says.

To help pull it all together, Barr teamed up with Nat Geo’s archive manager William Bonner, who for 30 years has sifted through the vintage prints in the journal’s 11.5 million image collection. Rounded out by photo editor Janna Dotschkal and designer Roy Wilhelm, the team looks for images that express a unique theme or historical nugget, while keeping to their collective aesthetic. “I’m always reaching for an abstract view to pair against the story,” says Bonner. “Always something quirky, kind of a sideways take.”

The team takes inspiration from the Tumblrs of Life and The New York Times, both of which use the platform to display their own collections of vintage photos. Nat Geo takes its effort one step further by asking Found readers to help with the photos’ histories. After decades in storage, many prints lack even basic information like location and date. The site hopes to to tap the power of the crowd to fill those gaps with a standing invitation for any information anyone might have about a given photograph. They say they’ve already received a lot of feedback, and future plans for the site include in-depth explorations of the stories behind individual photos.

Some posts on Found stimulate tens of thousands of responses in just a matter of days. The active viewership validates the old-school, hard-bitten exploration of early photographers, which often led to brilliant and dangerous work that has since fallen out of appreciation. Bonner, for one, hopes to see that those responsible for these photos get their due exposure. “Everyone seems to know about National Geographic photography, but people in the art community probably do not know our early photographers by name,” he says. “I would like to change that.”

 

http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2013/06/natgeo-blog-mines-their-incredible-archives-for-precious-gems/?viewall=true

 

 

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