The U.N. Restored

I like playing with the color restoration setting on the scanner.  Sometimes it works well, sometimes not.

Visiting the United Nations

I'm not going to write much about the United Nations.  There's a ton of written material about the U.N., both on line and in books.  The U.N. was an outgrowth of the World War 2 alliance that fought Nazi Germany and the Japanese militarists. The conference that laid out the structure of the U.N. was held in San Francisco between April and June 1945, and the actual treaty that created the institution was signed on October 24, 1945 at Lake Success, a small village on Long Island, New York.  It's headquarters has been in New York City since it's founding.  It's current building opened in 1952, and was designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Neimeyer.

Remember  the good old days when most Americans supported the United Nations.  I know lots still do, but those numbers are a lot smaller today.  The first photo in this column is labeled "UN TRIP AUG 10."  The second and fourth, "W L WALTER," the lady, "A M WALTER."

Leo Rosenthal, Photographer 5

The last of the Leo Rosenthal photographs.

Leo Rosenthal, Photographer 4

A heated discussion at the U.N?  As I noted in an earlier post, I'm just pulling these out of the envelope at random.  When I started deciphering the captions, I saw that they have been written by one of the subjects in the second photo, so my apologies to Leo Rosenthal for my criticisms of his hand writing.  And, for some reason I don't understand, bits to the right of the horizontal images seem to be cut off, but click, bring it up in a larger window, and the whole width of the image becomes visible.  That's important on the last one in the column, since some of the writing can't be seen except in a separate window.

Leo Rosenthal, Photographer 3

Once again I'm posting the backs of the prints because I'm baffled by Leo Rosenthal's handwriting.  I can make out Carnegie House.  I did a search on that and found a rather expensive apartment house in Manhattan.  My guess is that the Carnegie House mentioned is actually the Carnegie Mansion, now owned by The Smithsonian, current home of The Cooper-Hewitt Museum Design Center.

Anyway, I'm just pulling pictures out of the envelope, and posting them as they come, so there's no attempt to bunch them in any order.

Leo Rosenthal, Photographer 2

The Leo Rosenthal collection continues, and they have captions.  The problem is, some of those captions are readable, and others not,  at least not by me, so I'll be doing something I don't usually don't, scan the backs and leave it to the viewers.  Is it me?  Are there two different sets of hand writing on the top print?  Remember, click on an image to bring it up in a bigger window.  

Leo Rosenthal, Photographer 1

Over the years, I've picked up a couple of collections of news photos, and over the next few days, I'll be posting one of those lots.

These are all photos by Leo Rosenthal, a photographer who led, to put it mildly, an interesting life.  I found an article about his life in a newspaper from 1968,  that listed his age as 83, so that puts 1885 as the year of his birth.  His father was a jeweler in Riga, Latvia, at the time part of the Russian Empire.  Leo went on to become a criminal lawyer, practicing in Moscow through two different revolutions.  He was part of the Kerensky government as head of The Bureau of Released Prisoners.  Under the Bolsheviks, he was The Executive Secretary of The Political Red Cross and was also a defense attorney for The Revolutionary Tribunals and latter The People's Court.  In 1919, attorneys became employees of the state, and a year latter, Leo Rosenthal moved to Berlin.

In 1922 he began his journalistic career as a reporter and photographer for Vorwarts the official newspaper of The German Social Democratic Party.  In 1934, the Nazi government banned Jews from working as journalists, so Rosenthal moved onto Paris, working as a correspondent for a number of Scandinavian based labor newspapers.  In 1940, the day before the Germans marched into Paris, he fled south to Vichy and continued his work as a journalist.  In 1942, his mother, brother, and three sisters were killed, in Riga, by the Nazis.  He fled to the United States, living in New York City.  To support himself, he stuffed dolls, worked as an artist's model, and was the assistant librarian at Rikers Island  Prison.  Eventually, he returned to photojournalism as a free-lance.  In 1945, he covered the United Nations Organization Conference in San Francisco,  and after the U.N. set up in New York City, he spent the rest of his career there.

Leo Rosenthal took more than 300,000 pictures during his years at the U.N.  In 1968, The United Nations Association of the United States sponsored an exhibition of his work, displaying more than 600 of his photos.  A book of his photos from Germany, "Leo Rosenthal, Ein Chronist in der Weimarer Republik, Fotografien 1926-1933" is available from Amazon.

All of these photos have the same stamp on the back. "PHOTO BY LEO ROSENTHAL, 315 WEST 102nd STREET, NEW YORK 25, N.Y.-TEL. UN.4-0893, PRIVATE PRINT--NOT FOR PUBLICATION UNLESS BY SPECIAL PERMISSION."  Labeled, "United Nations Commission on Human Rights, 10th session, February, March 1954."