Sad news out of Iowa, as a photographer's 65-year-old business was destroyed when a powerful tornado ripped through his town.
Marshalltown, Iowa was hit by a tornado on July 19, which damaged or destroyed numerous buildings in the city of approximately 27,000 people. One of the businesses destroyed was Cline Photo, owned by Harold Cline. Remarkably, Cline has run the business since 1953, when he started it with his late wife, Ardell, who passed away earlier this year. He's now 92 years old. The business' longevity is so remarkable that Cline says he has shot weddings for three generations of the same family. Sadly, he likely lost a large portion of his archives to the storm, and it's not clear if he plans to rebuild after the cleanup is finished.
The Marhsalltown tornado was rated an EF-3 on the Enhanced Fujita scale with peak winds of 144 mph, which corresponds to a "severe" tornado capable of completely removing the roof of a home and destroying most exterior walls. EF-3 or higher tornadoes are rare, accounting for only about four percent of all tornadoes. The tornado injured 17 people, but thankfully, no one was killed. I hope Cline is able to recover as much of his work as possible.
Devistating. Glad he has family helping.
Heartbreaking!
Some much history in that building it devastating to loose his business as well as a lot of the history.
I was interested by the line, "he likely lost a large portion of his archives." Permanence is a big discussion between film and digital advocates, and the pros for film and prints is usually that the physical medium is safer because digital files may be corrupted or lost, the formats may become obsolete as technology ages, etc. In this case the physical media lasted 65 years but was destroyed in an instant by an act of nature. That certainly makes a strong argument for digital which can be stored in the cloud, copied to additional off-location drives, and re-copied or updated with relative ease compared to a large archive of negatives.
I'm not suggesting that Cline Photos should have digitized decades of old negatives, that wouldn't make financial sense and of course they aren't to blame for an unpredictable natural disaster. It just made me rethink the idea of physical media as an archival solution; the things that make it timeless also make it vulnerable.