The Associated Press Collection

The Associated Press is the world’s oldest and largest newsgathering organization, and its photo archive is the largest and most comprehensive of 20th Century news and historical photography, comprised of over 60 million images. The Associated Press has been honored with the Pulitzer Prize for Photography 28 times since the inception of this award, including perhaps the most recognizable image in American photojournalism history, Flag Raising at Iwo Jima.

iPHOTOART publishes The Associated Press Collection photographs as open edition and limited edition photographic prints.

The Associated Press was born on an early morning in May 1848, when 10 men, representing six New York City newspapers, sat around an office table of the New York Sun. They had been in session for more than an hour and all that time they had been in stubborn argument. At issue was the costly collection of news by telegraphy. The newly invented telegraph made transmission of news possible by wire but at costs so high that the resources of any single paper would be strained.

David Hale of the Journal of Commerce argued that only a joint effort between New York's papers could make telegraphy affordable and effectively prevent telegraph companies from interfering in the newsgathering process. To get news from the west and from abroad, Hale argued, newspapers had to work together if the public was to be served with increasingly wider coverage of the United States and the world. Although reluctant at first, the six highly competitive papers agreed to the historic plan, and The Associated Press was born.