Inside the Atlantic Records Vault

Over the years, Atlantic Records collected a vast assortment of material. While we can easily imagine the tapes lying around, a priceless amount of music sitting in some vault, waiting for someone to notice what they have. But we don't think so much of pictures.

The images have been scattered about in dusty and moldy warehouses, relics of the pre-Internet age when photography was integral to selling music, and the photographers — names like Irving Penn, Annie Leibovitz, Lee Friedlander and Robert Mapplethorpe — went on to become nearly as famous as the subjects they captured and defined.

Warner Music Group, which now owns Atlantic, is scouring "nearly 100,000 boxes," of photographs, "from warehouses around the globe."

Included in what has been found so far:

a series of unpublished black-and-white shots of Led Zeppelin in the studio in 1969 by Jim Cummins. The intimate collection by Mr. Cummins, who was an Atlantic photographer, portrays a group of young rockers before they became hugely famous and includes a rare image of Robert Plant, the band’s singer, playing the acoustic guitar.

Expect the pictures to be made publicly available sometime in the future as Warner looks to monetize it's collection.

More here.