Note to Correspondents

100 YEARS OF RECORDING HISTORY:  A PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION

 

OPENS AT UN HEADQUARTERS ON 20 SEPTEMBER

 

A photographic exhibition entitled “ITAR-TASS:  100 Years of Recording History” will be on display in the General Assembly Visitors’ Lobby from 20 September through 8 October 2004.  This exhibit marks the 100th anniversary of the leading information agency of the Russian Federation and highlights the upcoming sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the United Nations.

A formal exhibit opening will take place on Monday, 20 September at 6 p.m. in the main gallery of the Visitors’ Lobby followed by a reception.  Opening remarks will be made by Sergey Lavrov, Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation, Mikhail Gusman, First Deputy Director-General of ITAR-TASS, and Shashi Tharoor, Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information.

Featuring over 100 photographs from the ITAR-TASS photo archives, the exhibit traces the path the news agency has taken through 100 years of its existence –- from czars to commissars, from the days of the first Russian Revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century, to the demise of theSoviet Union and the resurgence of a new democratic Russia in the 1990s.  TASS photo correspondents were also on hand when the United Nations founding conference got under way in San Francisco, resulting in the signing of the Charter in 1945.

Established in 1904 by the highest decree of the last of the Romanovs, Czar Nicholas II, the first Russian official news organization was first known as St. Petersburg Telegraphic Agency.  In 1992, when the Russian Federation proclaimed its sovereignty, it took on its present name, the Information Telegraph Agency of Russia (ITAR-TASS).

This exhibition was co-produced by ITAR-TASS, Moscow, the Department of Public Information (DPI) and the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations, and made possible through the support of the Russian Federal Agency for the Press and Mass Communications, NOMOS-BANK, UTair Aviation, Polet Cargo Airlines and Vnesheconombank.

For more information, call Jan Arnesen, tel.:  (212) 963-8531; or Liza Wichmann, tel.:  (212) 963-0089 of the Exhibits Unit, DPI.

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