Official Portraits

Hardcover

208 pp, colour, 16 x 21 cm
£14.95 / €24.95 / $24.95
ISBN 1-904563-33-3

Orders: www.trolleybooks.com

"Each photo becomes a passport into a country" Malcolm Beith, Newsweek

Authority, leadership, stability, benevolence, even grace: these are some of the qualities state leaders seek to portray in their official portraits. When all member states of the United Nations were asked to submit the official portrait of their Head of State the diversity was surprising: ranging from snapshots to staged tableaux in generic offices, from full-length portraits in front of stately buildings to close-ups before national emblems. Some portraits invoke the bureaucratic machinery that went into their production, while others seem more indebted to personal whimsy; even the banality of the everyday snapshot occasionally creeps into these staged displays of
official power.

Editorial influence is kept to a minimum. The selection of a single image to be reproduced in this volume was always left to the submitting embassies or governmental press offices. Organised alphabetically by state, Official Portraits allows these images to speak for themselves.