One of Sundance’s Biggest Surprise Hits: A Fledgling Photo Agency Called WireImage

Back when Jeff Vespa first started snapping photographs at Sundance, the internet was called the World Wide Web and the only thing digital about cameras was that you needed a finger to press the button. “I had to hand-build the web pages every night after shooting,” he remembers. “We’d send an assistant to get the film developed in Salt Lake City, bring it back, and at 3 in the morning, I’d be scanning slides into the computer.”

That hand-built website, SundancePix.com, went live in 2000 and was the precursor for a new photo agency called WireImage, which launched 25 years ago this month. For the next two decades, it made Vespa the film festival’s favorite photographer. He and his crew — which at one point filled Park City with about 100 assistants, bookers and editors — roamed all over, capturing every young breakout, maverick filmmaker and crazy producer trudging through the snow in Utah.

Of course, in the early 2000s, Sundance was a shaggier, less-choreographed event, which made for a much more playful photographic backdrop. Over those first years, as WireImage was being formed, Vespa caught Ethan Hawke and Kyle MacLachlan mid-snowball fight, Eddie Furlong and Natasha Lyonne sharing a cigarette break and Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston schmoozing with Robert Redford. Many of the stars he shot were all but unknown (like some kid named Ryan Gosling). Some were already legends (Christopher Walken, glowering at a ski shop). A few were unexpected (Johnny Rotten improbably turning up at the festival). All are worth revisiting.