2002

Isn’t it time the Country of Happy Holidays had its own place at the UN table??

The UN Headquarters are located in Manhattan – on 1st Avenue in the 40s. Whenever the UN General Assembly was in session, traffic was terrible on the East Side and you had to know to tell taxi drivers to avoid that area. Kofi Annan was Secretary-General of the United Nations at the time and both he and the UN were co-recipients of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize. That gave me the idea of doing a UN-themed holiday card. I took a guided tour of the UN to suss it out. It was one year after 9/11 and security was tight. I quickly realized, even with my prior holiday cards in hand as show-and-tell, they would never let me shoot my card in the actual UN so I kept my eye out for details of how I could recreate it elsewhere. On my way out, I bought an official UN flag in the gift shop as my first prop.

I studied photos from the UN General Assembly to mimic the font used at the time for their country plaques and I had my own country plaques made. The photos also showed each UN diplomat wearing a white wired earpiece for simultaneous translation. To recreate them, while the internet was still relatively new, Craigslist had started nation-wide in 2000 (two years prior) and I found a guy named Frank on Craigs List who had black earpieces. I borrowed someone’s car to drive an hour out to Brooklyn where Frank lived (back when Brooklyn was not the new Manhattan!) and he let me borrow them for the shoot. I then painstakingly covered each of Frank's black earpieces in white electrical tape to make them appear to be just like the white ones the UN used (electrical tape so it could be easily removed before I returned them to Frank afterwards). I bought some fake moustaches to try out for my costume, bought a man’s wig, and borrowed a suit and tie. I’d been doing freelance work for the Columbia Business School Executive Education program at the time and Schon (aka “France”) and Fidel (aka “Phillipines”) helped me secure a classroom to use for this (we shot on the weekend when the classroom was empty). I recruited 7 friends and family members as extras, and thus turned a Columbia Business School classroom in Warren Hall into the UN General Assembly. Additionally, for the first time, the tireless photographer Geoffrey Croft (see “Italy”) got to be in the photo.

Having done most of these shoots so far with just me and Geoff and the strangers who we happened upon, this was a different experience to create the whole scene from scratch including cajoling my friends and family to come play too. My friend Nuala’s father Manny Gonzalez (aka “Dominican Republic) and my uncle Gene Weisberger (aka “Kazakhstan) have since passed away. They both loved being part of this and Gene, who was writing a lot at the time, wrote a short story about it. At the wake for Manny, there were many bulletin boards displaying photos of him, and one of the photos was this one. A few people were surprised to see this and asked about his time at the UN.

Since we had so much fun posing for these photos, there were lots of great shots so I ended up sending out several versions (see below).