Corbis

» see corbis.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

corbis was a watermark before it was a company, at least in my head. anyone who went looking for a decent picture on the web between about 2000 and 2012 has seen that word printed diagonally across an image they were not allowed to use. i never had a reason to license anything, so it existed for me only as the thing standing between a search result and a usable file.

gates registered it privately in 1989, outside microsoft, under the name interactive home systems. it became continuum productions in 1992 and corbis after that. the founding idea was genuinely forward-looking and about fifteen years early. flat screens would eventually hang on walls in ordinary houses and people would want art on them, at which point somebody would need to already own the digital rights. gates was building his own house around exactly that premise at the time.

the screens arrived late and turned out to be for netflix. so the company did the sensible thing with the rights it had already accumulated and became a stock photography agency, which is a business with a real market and thin margins. in october 1995 it bought the bettmann archive, roughly nineteen million photographs that included the pre-1983 united press international library. in june 1999 it took sygma, the french news agency, adding about forty million more.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the mine ~

the bettmann purchase came with a physical problem. nineteen million negatives and prints were sitting in a manhattan building on ordinary shelves, and the acetate ones were slowly destroying themselves. in 2001 corbis paid to move the whole collection into an iron mountain facility in boyers, pennsylvania, two hundred and twenty feet underground in a worked-out limestone mine, refrigerated to something close to freezing.

the tradeoff was public and argued about for years. at that temperature the film survives for centuries but nobody can walk in and browse it, because anything pulled has to be acclimatized on the way out. corbis said the digital scans were the access copy and the originals were the insurance policy. archivists said the effect was that the twentieth century's news photography had been put somewhere no researcher could reach without an appointment and a business reason.

~ the actual end ~

the whole time, getty was winning. getty had bought the same kind of archives faster and had a better web store earlier, and by the late 2000s the entire pricing floor was falling out from under both of them anyway, because a photographer with a decent camera would upload to istockphoto for a few dollars a picture. corbis was widely reported to have lost money for most of its existence, which is a thing a private company owned by one very rich person can afford to do for a very long time.

on 22 january 2016 it stopped. the image licensing business, veer included, went to unity glory international, an affiliate of visual china group. vcg then licensed distribution of everything outside china to getty images, so the archive corbis spent twenty-seven years assembling ended up in the storefront of the company it had been built to compete with. the leftover advertising and product-placement arm was renamed branded entertainment network in may 2016 and moved to los angeles, and became benlabs in 2023.

corbis.com does not resolve at all now. the pictures are all still there, in the mine and in getty's index, credited to somebody else.

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