It was the biggest disaster in the history of music business, and almost nobody knew the truth about the 2008 Universal Studios fire. An archival storage vault with about 175K recordings from some of the greatest artists of the past century - from Ella Fitzgerald to Nirvana - just went up in smoke. Irreplaceable original beloved classics, countless unreleased recordings & studio sessions vanished from the world forever - along with a huge swath of their cultural legacy.

For this huge NYT story, we shot a series of iconic musician photographs burning, capturing the incredibly tactile photo stock details - flaming, bubbling, charring, peeling and getting slowly destroyed by flames.