Surreal and Subterranean
David BiggsOn a cold January morning in 2011, I met a French colleague at a train platform in SaintDenis, a northern suburb of Paris. We were headed to a 19th century French fort, Fort de l'Est, to rephotograph prints of air photos taken by French forces over central Vietnam in the 1940s and 50s. A few days earlier, she had introduced me to the lone archivist responsible for maintaining all of France's historic military air photography, a collection covering much of Europe as well as North Africa and Indochina. At his main office at the Service Historique de la Défense (SHD) inside the walls surrounding the historic Chateau de Vincennes, the archivist navigated a wholly analog system of handdenoted, paper index maps and plastic overlays to identify specific rolls of film and photo frames for my area of interest. The film and photos are stored separately at Fort de l'Est because the " caves " built into the mounds surrounding the fort provide a natural form of climate control. Compared to most archive sites, the SHD facility at Vincennes and the French Air Force's storage at Fort de l'Est are surreal. Working inside these buildings, a belle epoch ballroom and an unheated cave of a mid19th century French fort, its easy to put oneself in other times. The archives at Vincennes occupies a series of elaborate 19th century buildings adjacent to a 14th century castle that housed French kings, a 17th century dungeon that imprisoned the Marquis de Sade, and a plaza that served as the execution spot for Mata Hari in 1917. Approaching both places, one travels through gates that separate the outside world of urban Paris from an internal, military and historical realm. Even outside Fort de l'Est in the industrial suburb of SaintDenis, I was surprised to see a gypsy camp situated in the moat outside the fort's walls. Inside the fort was an active military facility. The historic air photography is stored beside the contemporary air surveillance activities of the French military, a program called " Plan Vigipirate. " Whereas photointerpreters pored over air photos in the 1960s, today's surveillance technicians stare at computer monitors connected to satellites and thousands of cameras. We walked past the contemporary air surveillance activities into concretelined " caves " to meet our archivist friend and pour over air photos taken in the early 1950s over Huế, Vietnam. My reward for this longplanned, complicated and expensive archive visit was wholly worth it. We found hundreds of air photos detailing built and natural features in Vietnam in an otherwise obscure period, the two decades after World War II and before American troops arrived. While American reading rooms in such places as the National Archives at College Park may lack the ambience of a Vincennes, the system for storing air photos and the cans of film is no less surreal. The cartographic records of the Defense Mapping Agency include the air photos used for military photo intelligence (World War 2 era) and photos that served as base materials for the production of topographic maps. The sterile veneer of an American reading room serving up historic air photography belies the national network of subterranean vaults storing millions of cans of film. The American solution is to subcontract the work of maintenance to the world's largest underground storage company, Iron Mountain, named after the first facility, an iron mine in upstate New York. 1 Today the company maintains hundreds of storage sites above and below ground around the world. My cans, I was told, were stored at a facility near Saint Louis MO along with millions of military personnel records. From these modern catacombs, the cans I had selected (Figure 1) were pulled from deep underground and then sent up to the surface. An Archives plane takes off daily from Saint Louis, delivering these materials to the Washington area.
