Dear Editor,
During 2014 I realised that I needed additional references for a project I had been working on for some years. I proceeded to the library at Guyana National Newspapers Limited (GNNL) and requested to view some 1994 shots on the subject matter. I was told that all those pictures from back then and further are not at GNNL; that they were removed to someplace else. Recently I returned to enquire about the same photographic archive that I knew existed when I worked for GNNL. It was still the same; GNNL had no photographic archive. The current editor is at a loss to know what I’m talking about; I assured him that there used to be not hundreds, but several thousand pictures in boxes in an upper level of the current library. In visiting that upper level one was always accompanied by library staff, and there were photographs from the late fifties ‒ unpublished photo-graphs of every major event in this nation, now gone.
The soul of a newspaper or publishing house has always been the divide between its lithographic/photographic and its printed content. Life magazine WW2 era photographs are even more valuable than the coverage of the particular story; it depends on who is exploring it. For such a volume of photographs from the oldest newspaper in the country to be taken is a national tragedy; some group has stolen a major chunk of our history and I don’t think such a travesty should be dealt with casually and with listless indifference.
Yours faithfully,
Barrington Braithwaite
