When Hurricane Milton threatened Tampa last October, photojournalist Christopher Morris faced a familiar challenge: protecting his archive from destruction. For days, he lifted folders of photographs onto 10-foot-high shelves inside his home while also rolling metal filing cabinets into a U-Haul in his driveway — to keep his archive above the storm surges. His life’s work — hundreds of thousands of photographs, negatives and digital files taken over decades — hung in the balance. When the storm veered south, sparing his home, Morris knew he had narrowly escaped catastrophe. “I can’t keep gambling with it year after year,” Morris said. “I have to find a solution.”
Morris’s dilemma is not unusual. His work and countless other photographic archives like it represent our collective visual history. Institutions such as the Library of Congress, which holds 16 million images, play a crucial role in preserving photojournalism, yet the surge of at-risk archives far exceeds anyone’s capacity. Adam Silvia, a photography curator at the library, usually receives two or three inquiries each month from photographers or their estates hoping to place a lifetime of work, but only a fraction can be accepted. The library holds just 12 complete archives of individual photojournalists. And there are many more photos than places to house them, digitize them and make them publicly available.
Despite the meticulous organization of her own archive, photographer Donna Ferrato, known for her work on domestic violence, has yet to find a home for it. “It’s the curse of the living photographer,” she says. “The older we get, the more we understand the value of every single photograph that connects us to a human being from our past.”
Without a clear plan, a photographer’s archive can become a burden rather than a legacy, leaving heirs — spouses, children or executors — to navigate complex decisions about storage, access and preservation. Ruth Orkin, best known for “American Girl in Italy” — a striking 1951 photograph of a young woman striding through a Florentine street as men turn to look — ensured her archive would be in the secure hands of her daughter, Mary Engel. But even with that preparation, Engel faced a steep learning curve as she took on the task when her mother died. Seeing how many others were in the same position, she founded the American Photography Archives Group in 2000. What began as a small peer network has since grown into a nonprofit with nearly 300 members, assisting both living photographers, such as Pete Souza, and the estates of legends such as Ansel Adams, Lee Miller, Elliott Erwitt, and André Kertész.
