DECEMBER 2019/JANUARY 2020 133
the other magazines. It was kept like a museum piece. We had
invested something of ourselves in those pages; we honored
them and treasured them.
For better or worse, saving issues of National Geographic
has evolved from a tradition to a trope. When people hear that
I’m an editor at large for Traveler, they inevitably say, “Oh! I
love your magazine! We have piles of them in our basement!”
And here I am in National Geographic’s basement. It strikes
me that Archivia is a metaphor for the basements around the
world where stacks of yellow-bordered magazines sit like reli-
gious relics. I look at the photos in front of me and think of
Bonner’s words. While not a perfect collection, these are living
images. They capture and preserve pieces of the world’s mosaic.THEN I THINK OF BAMIYAN. Ever since I’d seen photographs, no
doubt in National Geographic, of the colossal Buddha statues
at Bamiyan, in Afghanistan, I had vowed to go there one day.
Sadly, I never made it, and in 2001 the Taliban dynamited theancient statues, obliterating them for eternity.
But not in Archivia. Andrews wheels the stairway into the
stacks and descends with a bulging folder. There they are: the
Buddhas of Bamiyan. They live again, and I transport myself to
them, feel the sun, the dusty wind, hear the braying of donkeys
in the foreground. The next photo takes my breath away. It shows
the 174-foot-tall main Buddha in its cliffside niche. A man stands
at its base, barely as tall as its sandaled foot. It is astonishing to
think of the size and scale of this statue carved so many centuries
before. And it is staggering to contemplate its loss.“JULIA, I WANT TO go to Machu Picchu,” I announce one morning.
She beckons me into the canyon between two towering stacks of
shelves. Geological layers of documentary expeditions surround
us as she points me to a long stretch packed with the type of
photo albums my parents would lovingly prepare after every
vacation. “This is Machu Picchu,” Andrews says, waving her hand
dramatically over two dozen albums.Archival film and art
are preserved in a
climate-controlled
room at National
Geographic
headquarters in
Washington, D.C.M
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