When music fans think of "record company vaults," the image is of miles of recording tapes filled with songs.

But back in the day there was more to it than that. Record companies had full-time staff taking photos, designing album covers and documenting everything going on. As the industry falters, labels are digging into the vaults and rediscovering musical history to mine the past for profit.

As an example, there's a new exhibit at Twist & Shout, 2508 E. Colfax Ave., displaying photos and album covers from the Sony/BMG archives. Those archives include Columbia, RCA and other labels that had major artists and photo crews. Glenn Korman, vice president of Sony BMG archives, and Tom Tierney, manager of the archives library, spoke recently with Rocky pop music writer Mark Brown about what they've found in the vaults.

The exhibit, which before now has been seen only in New York and Los Angeles, features unseen photos of Billie Holiday, Tony Bennett, Bob Dylan, Sly Stone, Johnny Cash, Billy Joel, Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin and more. It's not just for show: items are for sale, too.

Where did these photos come from?

Tierney: (Sony and BMG) had their own photo studios from roughly 1955 through about 1980, which had staff photographers. Anything having to do with company activities - from recordings to sales conferences and conventions - these photographers were sent out to photograph everything.

What we have now, luckily, is a collection of concert photographs for all of the artists who recorded for Sony and BMG labels. All the major people - Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday and up into the '70s and the rock era with Journey, Aerosmith - all genres.

Take, for example, the famous photograph of Bob Dylan from his second album cover walking down that snowy street with his girlfriend. What they did was they sent a photographer out. He took a whole reel of footage, and we have 25 more images from that day.

What are you finding on those extra images?

Tierney: Richard Burton recorded an album of Hamlet when he was doing that onstage in New York in the early '60s. They took pictures of Burton for the album cover. It so happened his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, stopped by the studio that day. So it never came out, but in our archives we have a picture of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor sitting in the studio, talking. That's just the sort of stuff that kills me to see.

What kind of state are the archives in?

Korman: Sony has been so lucrative with so many Grade A reissue artists who are perennial sellers . . . (that) Sony, and CBS before it, put a lot of attention into its holdings in an orderly fashion over a period of years. They created a database with all the shoots and photographers and organized them in archival settings.

On the BMG side we had a lot of contact sheets but not any negatives we were aware of until we stumbled on a warehouse eight or nine years ago in Long Island City - an abandoned warehouse of a photo-processing company that RCA used. In that warehouse we found all these cabinets full of all the negatives that went missing.

We're talking hundreds of thousands of negatives, of Elvis Presley, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, any artist you can think of from the RCA catalog. Harry Belafonte, Fiddler on the Roof with Zero Mostel recording these things in costume. Hundreds of thousands of them in envelopes. They looked like the kind of envelopes you'd hand over a cash ransom.

What did you find that was jaw-dropping?

Korman: Tom found John Kennedy's inaugural backstage photos. It was an inaugural where Frank Sinatra was the editorial director. You have pictures backstage of Sinatra, who was not recording for us at the time, speaking with Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte . . . all these people backstage, with heightened security, soldiers. The reason we have that was because the inaugural, the cultural aspect of Kennedy's inaugural, was overseen by Leonard Bernstein.

Leonard is probably the single artist for which we have the most photos in our whole collection. They followed him everywhere. The great jaw-dropping finds we were not expecting to find are at things like that: events, conventions, conferences. In our database those are just listed by "1958, country and western sales conference" without any names. If we go in and investigate we find Johnny Cash onstage at this conference doing an Elvis Presley impersonation.

Tierney: The thing that keeps cropping up is Andy Warhol . . . release party, some company event. Here's Andy Warhol with Dolly Parton. And oh, there he is with the Clash. It's just very funny, the nature of Warhol himself, how he just keeps cropping up. Oh, there he is again.

What physical things did you find in the vault besides photos?

Korman: If you're familiar with Bruce Springsteen's first album, Greetings From Asbury Park, the album cover is an Asbury Park, N.J., postcard. We have the actual postcard that Bruce gave to the art director, saying, "This is what I want to be the cover." It has a little pinhole at the top.