How Condé Nast Plans to Monetize Its Photo Archive

Condé Nast Publications might be sitting on a gold mine: its archive of some eight million photographs and illustrations from Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Vogue, Architectural Digest and other magazines. Now, given the tenuous state of the media industry, the company has plans to exploit it.

The archive is housed on the 15th floor of a building not far from Condé Nast’s headquarters at One World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. Photographs and magazines, some going back more than 100 years, are stored in plastic slips and stacked in folders or tucked away in cabinets. Down the hall from the main room is a cold-storage locker, where original slides and transparencies are cataloged out of harm’s way.