The Sun-Times photo archive was thought to have been lost, until an executive from ...

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Andrew Feinberg Retweeted

The Sun-Times photo archive was thought to have been lost, until an executive from the Chicago History Museum opened a 30-by-30-foot storage locker in Dixon in 2017 and found more than 225 containers inside it containing roughly 5 million negatives. https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/2020/7/9/21036565/chicago-history-museum-sun-times-photo-archive

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LOST AND FOUND
About 5 million Sun-Times photo negatives were thought to have been lost — until discovered by the Chicago History Museum, which begins to put them on display Friday.

By Ashlee Rezin Garcia Jul 9, 2020, 6:00pm CDT

In December 2017, an executive from the Chicago History Museum opened a 30-by-30-foot storage locker in Dixon and found more than 225 containers inside it containing roughly 5 million negative frames from Chicago Sun-Times photographs.

Cardboard boxes at the bottom of the stacks had been crushed under the weight of the bins above, and negatives by photojournalists such as Pulitzer Prize-winner John H. White, Pete Souza, Bob Black and Nancy Stuenkel had spilled onto the floor.

Until then, the location and condition of the newspaper’s photo archive had been a mystery — owners and employees of the Sun-Times were unaware the negatives were sitting in a storage facility about 100 miles west of Chicago.

The millions of images captured iconic moments. There was the back-to-school Bud Billiken Parade in 1953. Elvis Presley performing at the Chicago Stadium in 1972. Mayor Harold Washington being inaugurated in 1983. Walter Payton playing during the Chicago Bears championship 1985 season.

“I was blown away,” said John Russick, the history museum’s vice president for interpretation and education, who made the discovery that day.

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