Misplaced Pages

Official Portraits

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.
This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages)
The topic of this article may not meet Misplaced Pages's notability guideline for books. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted.
Find sources: "Official Portraits" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (October 2017) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
This article relies largely or entirely on a single source. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please help improve this article by introducing citations to additional sources.
Find sources: "Official Portraits" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (September 2024)
(Learn how and when to remove this message)
This article is about the 2004 book. For portraits of governmental officials, see Portrait.

Official Portraits is a book published by Berlin Press in 2004.

In 2004, a team of Berlin Press contributors, led by David Brown sent an open letter fax to the embassies of all 191 member states of the United Nations General Assembly, requesting they provide an official portrait of their nation's Head of State. Most obliged, and Official Portraits is thus a gallery of the received entries. The portraits vary greatly in quality, photography style, and size, but Brown says there is no noticeable correlation between the quality of the portrait and any variable of the country that provided it. Some countries did not provide a suitable portrait (for example, merely emailing a low-resolution JPEG), these are included in a small index in the back of the book.

In Brown's letter he specifically asks the embassies for pictures of their "effective head of state... who actually runs the country." In practice, a more formal term may be "head of government" and indeed, most of the portraits are of heads of government (Prime Ministers) and thus not heads of state per se. Some countries did not understand the request, apparently, and emailed portraits of figurehead or otherwise symbolic officials who cannot be said to "run the country" in any meaningful sense. These include:

It may also be interesting to political scientists to note the photographs submitted by countries whose exact office of heads of state or government are unclear:

References

External links

Zwangsleitner, Klaus, ed. (2004). Official portraits : the executive heads of state of the 191 member states of the United Nations Organisation. : Trolley. ISBN 978-1904563334.

Category: