Press Bar, United Nations, NY, 1989

For his series International Territory: The United Nations, 1945—95, Adam Bartos photographed the modernist United Nations headquarters in New York. Founded after World War II, the UN's purpose was to stop wars by fostering peaceful compromise among nations, yet the idealism of the original organization has somewhat corroded as corruption, decay, and the realities of human nature have pervaded the institution and its servants.

Bartos's series captures the beauty of the UN's modernist architecture, along with the effects of time on both the building and the organization itself. This photograph was taken shortly after Valentine's Day in 1989 at the Press Bar on the third floor of the General Assembly building. Typical of Bartos's practice, the image captures a lonely reality, with a sense of something forgotten, obsolete, and neglected.

Adam Bartos is known for images with intense, saturated colors depicting ordinary scenes that exude a quiet calm and often a tinge of melancholy. Though he is drawn to places with symbolic significance that have almost come to embody their own clichés—New York City, Los Angeles, Paris—Bartos photographs his subjects from a consistent, disinterested distance that reveals truths beyond the trope. His work examines things and places as they really are and not for what they represent. The resulting photographs speak to the movement of time and things forgotten. Bartos has published several of his photographic series in books. Among them, International Territory: The United Nations, 1945—95, published in 1995, illustrates the effects of time on the United Nations building in New York. In 2001, he published Kosmos: A Portrait of the Russian Space Age, photographs of the "obsolescent future" of the Soviet space program. Yard Sale Photographs, 2009, exemplifies Bartos' attraction to objects with an aura of the relic.

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