132 NATGEOTRAVEL.COM
Now I’m here, and there’s no way out.
Andrews is my ambassador to Archivia; she’s a red-haired
whirlwind of expertise and enthusiasm, here to guide me through
the wonders of this little-visited wilderness. She hands me a pair
of white cotton gloves. “Where do you want to go?”
I ask Andrews to show me the oldest photo, which turns out to
be an unremarkable shot of a mountain in the Caucasus. We look
at 1880s postcard-style photos of Europe (purchased on a four-
year honeymoon by early National Geographic Society donors
Mr. and Mrs. Phelps, who, Andrews tells me, later divorced) and
some evocative hand-tinted photos of Japan taken in 1914 by
an intrepid American named Eliza Scidmore.
The magic doesn’t happen until the end of the day when I
come upon a seemingly simple 1936 photo of Paris. The shot
shows an artist who has set up his easel on a cobbled alley in
Montmartre and is painting Sacré-Coeur, which looms dreamily
in the distance. Suddenly I’m transported to my own Parisian
summer in 1975, to the cobbled alleys where I fell in love with
the city, with France, and with life. It’s like I’ve eaten a photo-
graphic madeleine. Memories flood through me. I end the day
tingling. How can one image taken eight decades earlier have
that effect?
The next day I ask to see pho-
tos from the 1909 Robert Peary
expedition to the North Pole,
which National Geographic
sponsored. Andrews hands them
to me, encased in the kinds of
three-ring binders I used in
high school, black-and-white
snapshots carefully inserted
into plastic sleeves. But what snapshots! A ship surrounded by
icebergs, members of the crew in their fluffy, furry polar gear.
This is photography as scientific and historical record. These
people were venturing where no one had gone before. These
photos say to the world: This is where we were. This is who we
were. This is what we saw. We bear witness. Cradling the photos
in my white-gloved hands, I feel a frisson. I’m holding history.
And what’s more, in this frustratingly cold cellar, it’s somewhat
easier to imagine a penetrating Arctic chill.
“Now I want to show you some autochromes,” Andrews says.
“These were the first color photos. They used grains of potato
starch dyed red, green, and blue on a glass plate. The first auto-
chrome appeared in National Geographic in 1914. Take a look
at these shots of Bali taken by Franklin Price Knott in 1928.”
She hands me a box filled with four-inch-square glass-plate
images. I put them on a light table, and another world leaps to
life: 17 young women in brilliantly patterned red, green, yellow,
and black skirts; a dance troupe in gold gowns and headdresses;
two women balancing ceremonial towers of fruits, as tall as they
are, on their heads. I imagine National Geographic readers in
Iowa, Texas, and Maine opening their monthly magazine to find
page after page of such images. How must this portfolio have
fired their imaginations?BILL BONNER IS A LANKY MAN whose bright eyes and wispy gray-
brown ponytail give him a wizardly appearance. He presided over
the photo collection for almost 34 years until his retirement in- One of the keys to unlocking Archivia is knowing Bonner.
Bonner managed a collection that contained about 10.5
million images taken up to the 1990s. “We had nearly half a
million black-and-white prints going back to the 1870s, about
12,000 illustrations, hand-tinted black-and-white prints, and
one of the largest collections of autochromes in the world. It’s
one of the biggest, most comprehensive records of the world
anywhere,” he tells me.
Voluminous and important, indeed. But is it representative?
I ask. “Is it an honest look across the board? No. But these photog-
raphers were showing locations that the average person couldn’t
get to. You’re seeing people going about their lives, people like us
just doing their thing. All these moments have been preserved.”
I ask Bonner what he thinks about the archives’ significance.
“I’m not a traveler, but I saw the whole world through these
pictures. I saw so many people.
And I traveled through time in
a way. There’s something about
it that made me sad. I found
myself wanting to go there—
and by ‘there’ I meant more in
time than in place. To that very
moment in the image. But that
moment is gone. The archives is
a sacred place for me.”
“GOOD MORNING! Today we’re going to Papua New Guinea. I
want you to see these photos taken in 1921 by Capt. Frank Hur-
ley,” Andrews says. The Papua New Guinea files are located
under “Guinea, New, British,” and as she maneuvers one of the
metal staircases into the stacks, one of its wheels squeaks like
birdcalls in a jungle.
A river of images seems to flow through my gloved hands:
a gauntlet of indigenous men welcoming the photographer to
their village (the eyebrow-raising caption reads: “Two rows of
cannibals formed a narrow guard of honor, down which we
passed.”); elaborately carved shields and layers of skulls; a
warrior with a headdress of teeth and an oblong shell as big as
his face attached to his lower lip; a woman with a fantastically
feathered headdress, a broad neck plate, necklaces of teeth slung
bandolier-style under her breasts, and an eight-inch-long stick
pierced through her nasal septum.
While the world has evolved in its sensibilities, these are
the images I remember from my childhood, when I plundered
stacks of neatly piled yellow-framed magazines in my parents’
basement. National Geographic was never thrown away likeThese photos say to the world:
This is where we were. This is
who we were. This is what we
saw. We bear witness.