The New York Times published its first photo in 1896. Until now their reporters, collaborators and freelance photographers took millions and millions of pictures. We’re talking about five to six million prints and contact sheets (each sheet representing many discrete images) and 300,000 sacks of negatives (at least 10 million frames in all). The picture archive also includes 13,500 DVDs, each storing about 4.7 gigabytes worth of imagery.
The New York Times staff estimated that if they were to post 10 archive photos every weekday on Tumblr they still wouldn’t be finished by 3935. But they gave it a shot. Here’s one great image of a Santa “heading toward the Garden State Plaza in Paramus, where the parking lot was already packed with automobiles of Christmas shoppers.”
And here are some of the staff members talking about the project:
You don’t have to be a newspaper or photography or history enthusiast to find this interesting.