Corbis: Ringier Specter expands image archive

Ringier Specter, the Swiss exclusive agent of the Corbis photo agency, has expanded its archive by 41,000 images. Three collections have been added: Crush includes emotional images suitable for advertising, among other uses. The Ivy collection contains images of people in various life situations. The Latitude series complements the image archive with animal and snapshots of everyday life. In total, the company now has 71 million images, 300,000 clips and illustrations. The new imagery is available now online available.

New online database and archiving center in Paris
Last week, Corbis opened a center for the conservation of the Sygma photo collection, an archive of documentary photography, in Garnay near Paris. The aim of the facility is to preserve the images of the collection while making them accessible to photographers, researchers, iconographers, historians and creative professionals. Locarchives, a company specializing in the preservation of documents, is responsible for the construction of the facility and designed the archive in collaboration with Henry Wilhelm.
Over 50 million negatives, prints, color slides, and contact sheets are stored in a temperature- and humidity-regulated, airtight environment covering approximately 800 square meters. The most significant images in the collection have also been digitized and placed on the website. The total number of images available online currently exceeds 800,000.

Cédric Gressent, Corbis, shows visitors examples of the images stored in the Sygma archive. (Photo: Yann Dejardin, Corbis)

In total, over 50 million images are stored in 7,000 meters of shelving. (Photo: Yann Dejardin, Corbis)

Jimi Hendrix at the Olympia Music Hall in Paris, January 1968. (Photo: Pierre Fournier, Sygma Corbis)

An American soldier in the Vietnam War, November 1966. (Photo: Henri Bureau, Sygma Corbis)

A young recruit from the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) during the civil war in Liberia, June 1990. (Photo: Patrick Robert, Sygma Corbis).