The InterDependent

Eskinder Debebe/UN Photo

The Secretary-General at an official dinner in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in April 2010. To his right is President Emomali Rahmon.

Photographing the range of United Nations activities from its New York City headquarters is a logistical challenge only for the hearty. Imagine organizing, editing and distributing images from 15 peacekeeping missions and hundreds of Secretariat operations worldwide, a task that would make even the most experienced photo editor weary if not leery.

With close to 200,000 pictures of UN work in dozens of countries, the UN Photo online database (www.unmultimedia.org/photo/) is an exceptional image bank that lives up to the job of capturing the UN by documenting the wide array of important international events that keep the UN so busy and huge.

Although the photo archives have been around for decades, images were not available online until the early 2000s. Because of a “need for speed,” in the words of Mark Garten, chief of the UN’s photo unit, the database went fully digital in 2004.

“The entire industry in terms of photo had gone to digital for news purposes, and the equipment had gotten to the point where we could actually archive stuff for the future,” Garten said in a phone interview with UNA-USA.

The photographs are free with written permission by downloading them in both low- and high-resolution formats from the UN Photo Web site. The ease of use makes the site helpful for news editors looking for images of anything from Security Council meetings in New York to fieldwork in Outer Mongolia. Educators and students looking for black and white photographs from a specific historical period, like apartheid South Africa, will find many to choose from.

For the UN, the photo site is part of a public relations campaign seeking to dispel perceptions that the UN is a bureaucratic and inert multinational organization. Pictures available in the database are designed to “further the aims and work of the United Nations,” according to the site.

UN peacekeeping missions are often mandated to hire their own photographers, who document the day-to-day activities under the direction of a country-specific public relations officer. Currently, there are 15 full-time staff photographers at headquarters and in missions around the world.

“Depending upon the mission, they could either be doing strictly military-type imagery, or they could be doing humanitarian imagery,” Garten said. “In terms of Haiti, once the earthquake happened, [the photographers] knew what was happening on the ground so they would send me captioned images … mostly humanitarian, whether it was trying to save people, trying to protect people, trying to get people food.”

In addition to contemporary photographs, UN Photo is undertaking a long-term project to digitize the entire archives—about 250,000 images currently available in the UN photo library in Manhattan.

Milton Grant/UN Photo

Nelson Mandela meets US boxers and others: from left, Mike Tyson, Jose Sulaiman, Sugar Ray Leonard, Mayor David Dinkins and Joe Frazier; 1990.

Retouching old black-and-white photographs, scanning them and writing captions takes about an hour for each picture, Garten said. While some are available now, many will not see the (digital) light of day for years. Garten hopes to build an online historical database to chronicle the UN’s 65-year history this year.

For Garten, who counts the historical photographs his favorites of the database, the project is appealing.

Asked why he enjoys these old photos, Garten said that “From the carrier pigeons taking the film and messages and whatnot to the old pictures of the Middle East getting around on camels…to some of the construction of the actual UN Secretariat, they’re just classic images.”