3 ms·

You can see 203,929 photos from the Bettmann collection here (not without the Getty watermark of course): https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/bettmann-archive h

You can see 203,929 photos from the Bettmann collection here (not without the Getty watermark of course): https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/bettmann-archive https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/bettmann-archive It really is an extraordinary, striking collection. Bill Gates should have donated it to an appropriate museum or similar (ideally public domain as much of it as possible), instead of selling it to Visual China. A morally reprehensible choice for someone worth $75 billion to make about one of the world's most important visual archives of historical record & expression.

paganel 6y ago
Apparently I can "purchase" an image of a "Mass Grave Site in Germany" filled with what I can imagine are Jewish bodies for as "little" as 150 euros, 475 euros if I want to "purchase" the large format. This is so wrong on so many levels, images like these should have been in the public domain since they were first taken, and you're completely right, it's morally reprehensible what a wealthy guy like Gates did. Hell, I'm a collector of older photos myself, I'm orders of magnitude less wealthy than Gates but I'm pretty sure I've invested a greater percentage of my money in purchasing those old photos than Gates did, but I would never think of asking for money for people to access those old photos (I've started scanning and geo-locating some of them on this personal website [1], which is already 8-year old now, so it might not look so great but the photos do open). [1] http://foto.maglina.ro/ http://foto.maglina.ro/