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      Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Collars, Captured by Camera

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      An exhibit at the Jewish Museum features photos of collars worn by the late Supreme Court justice.Good morning. It’s Friday. We’ll look at an exhibition of photographs of the collars that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wore. We’ll also look at a Manhattan Democrat whose City Hall hopes were dashed in 2021 but who is now looking into challenging Mayor Eric Adams in 2025.Kris GravesIn the soft stillness of a museum gallery, you could forget that the photographs on the walls around you were shot under time pressure.Six minutes each, the photographer Elinor Carucci told me.The photographs, on view at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, are haunting, almost three-dimensional images of collars and necklaces that belonged to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      A Trump Mug Shot for History

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      The former president’s booking photo is unprecedented. And that’s just the beginning of its significance.As soon as it was taken, it became the de facto picture of the year. A historic image that will be seared into the public record and referred to for perpetuity — the first mug shot of an American president, taken by the Fulton County, Ga., Sheriff’s Office after Donald J. Trump’s fourth indictment. Though because it is also the only mug shot, it may be representative of all of the charges.As such, it is also a symbol of either equality under the law or the abuse of it — the ultimate memento of a norm-shattering presidency and this social-media-obsessed, factionalized age.“It’s dramatically unprecedented,” said Sean Wilentz, a professor of American history at Princeton University. “Of all the millions, maybe billions of photos taken of Donald Trump, this could stand as the most famous. Or notorious.” It is possible, he added, that in the future the mug shot will seem like the ultimate bookend to a political arc in the United States that began decades ago, with Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook.”In the photo, Mr. Trump is posed against a plain gray backdrop, just like the 11 of his fellow defendants whose mug shots were taken before him, including Mark Meadows, Sidney Powell and Rudolph Giuliani.As with them, his face is lit from above by a blinding white flash that hits his ash blond hair like a spotlight. As usual, he is dressed in the colors of the American flag: navy suit, white shirt, bright red tie — though his typical flag lapel pin is either absent or invisible in the picture. He glowers out from beneath his brows, unsmiling, eyes rendered oddly bloodshot, brow furrowed, chin tucked in, as if he is about to head-butt the camera. The image is stark, shorn of the flags and fancy that have been Mr. Trump’s preferred framings for photo ops at Mar-a-Lago or Trump Tower, or during his term in office, and that communicate power and the gilded glow of success.Was the photo necessary? In the last few years, a number of police departments and newsrooms around the country have been rethinking the practice of releasing mug shots to the public, viewing them as prejudicial at a time when a subject has not yet been proved guilty. The prosecutors in the other three Trump cases, both state and federal, have refrained from taking mug shots of Mr. Trump at all, given that he is one of the most recognizable people in the world and not considered a flight risk. Georgia laws, however, dictate that a mug shot be taken for a felony offense, and the Georgia sheriff in charge of booking has said that all defendants will be treated equally.Either way, it is part of the pageantry of the moment, part of the theater of law. And Mr. Trump is a man who has always understood the power and language of theater. Of putting on a show. Of the way an image can be used for viral communication and opinion-making.That’s part of why the “would they or wouldn’t they” discussion about mug shots resurfaced each time an indictment was handed down. In its concrete reality, the Fulton County mug shot may seem more irrevocable than anything else that has happened in the Trump cases thus far — at least until the two sides enter a courtroom. Perhaps that is why the concept alone started trending on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, even before Mr. Trump had boarded a plane to Georgia to surrender.While very few voters are likely to have read any of the Trump indictments in full, they will almost all definitely see the mug shot, and the former president — who posted this one on his recently reinstated feed on X, not long after it was released — cares deeply about his pictures. He always has.As far back as 2016, he was complaining about photos of him that NBC had used, especially one that he said showed him with a double chin. In 2017 he tweeted about a CNN book on the election: “Hope it does well but used worst cover photo of me!” In 2020, when a snap of him on the White House lawn with his hair blown back in the wind went viral, he chimed in: “More Fake News. This was photoshopped, obviously, but the wind was strong and the hair looks good? Anything to demean!”And earlier this month on Truth Social, he said of the Fox News show “Fox & Friends,” “They purposely show the absolutely worst pictures of me, especially the big ‘orange’ one with my chin pulled way back.” (The picture he seemed upset about showed him with his chin tucked in, rather than jutting out, creating the appearance of a few extra chins.) The suggestion was that this was part of the reason he would not join the first Republican primary debate.He has crowed about how generals advising him were “better looking than Tom Cruise and stronger”; insisted that the women who work for him should “dress like women,” according to Axios; and griped that Vogue never gave Melania a cover while he was in the White House.He knows that for an electorate raised on TV and social media, the picture is what lasts. It’s what is remembered (and what is memed). What makes the myth. Or unmakes it. Words come and go, but imagery is a language everyone can understand. And this latest image is clear proof of a situation that is not within the former president’s control. It cannot be airbrushed or filtered or otherwise altered.Now that it exists, however, how it will be interpreted and used is still a question.Mug shots have, through history, been weaponized in different ways. They have been used to suggest guilt and shame, and to knock down the famous, as with O.J. Simpson, whose flat stare and five o’clock shadow ended up on the cover of Time — albeit in an image darkened unnecessarily by the magazine.But mug shots have also become symbols of pride: of those who stand against abuse of power and legal wrongs, as with the mug shots of Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis, or even Jane Fonda, whose 1970 mug shot after she had been arrested on false charges of drug smuggling, fist raised against the Vietnam War, became a call to action for a generation of activist women.Mr. Trump and his advisers understand this all too well. Indeed, his team had most likely been planning and thinking about how Mr. Trump should look in his mug shot, what expression he should use, since the photo became a possibility.There was little chance, for example, that he would be caught smiling, like John Edwards, the former senator whose mug shot was taken in 2011 when he was indicted on a charge of violating campaign finance laws.The Trump team had, after all, already created its own joke “mug shot” with a fake height chart, an ersatz name placard and the slogan “Not Guilty” below it all after his first indictment, splashing it on T-shirts and coffee cups in his campaign store, the better to make a mockery of the whole idea. Though it is also true that his expressions in both the fake and the real photos are similarly pugnacious. He and his team have been laying the groundwork for this particular contingency for awhile. More

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      In A Time of Panthers: Jeffery Henson Scales photographs Black history

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      In A Time of Panthers: Jeffery Henson Scales photographs Black history An absorbing pictorial history of a key component of the Black Power movement shows its relevance has not receded todayJeffrey Henson Scales is a New York Times photo editor. His latest book is most compelling in how it helps place the relentless quest for equal treatment in easily understood context. Beyond beauty or mere appealing images, In a Time of Panthers is a highly valuable work.Sisters of the revolution: the women of the Black Panther partyRead moreCharacterizing the Black Panther movement as “the vanguard of the African American civil rights struggle”, Henson Scales shows how it emerged. The movement became “focused on police violence and community needs in over-policed and under-served communities of color”. To Henson Scales, “So much in all of our lives would continue to change in ways unforeseen to me … so many of the issues that motivated us during these inspired years of activism in America remain unresolved.”For sure, the scourge of urban crime is still hotly debated. The writer Adam Gopnik once remarked that so long as you promise to keep them safe, even in Manhattan, the white middle-class is “pretty much content to look away when the rights of others are being violated”.This, according to a Bronx politician who spoke on condition of anonymity, “is why New York state’s recently hard-won amelioration of bad police policy is threatened now”. Jeff Mays, a Times reporter who lives in Harlem, concurred. He observed the irony of how closely the new Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, echoed the Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin, a Trump supporter. Repeatedly, as hard as he could, Zeldin hit Governor Kathy Hochul with the upsurge in crime attendant to the Covid pandemic. Though making their other differences clear, Mays said of Adams and Zeldin: “Certainly their rhetoric has been very similar on things like bail reform.”Changing discriminatory bail laws, an historic accomplishment meant to equalize justice, was hardly easy. In reaction to Black Lives Matter activists, responding to a rash of police murders, progressive leaders sought to finally fix one of the many issues raised by the Panthers.“Even with it taking until now to address, there’s pushback,” said the Bronx official. . “Some seem eager to retreat to where we were. Man that’s a pitiful shame! And, without a shred of evidence, Adams connecting crime to the bail law – that was just short of a Willie Horton ad. And for Democrats, in the most enlightened place there is, New York, it was just as destructive too.”To Henson Scales, crime is complicated.“It requires nuanced thinking,” he maintains. Yes, today’s increase of violent crime is still “only” producing a few hundred annual homicides, versus a few thousand in the smaller city of 1990. “But with many, many more guns, with magazines capable of cutting down hundreds of victims in seconds, sometimes I do feel as unsafe as I did in the 1990s.”He cautions: “It’s imperative not to overreact and at all cost to avoid unintended consequences, like the mass incarceration that accompanied the Rockefeller drug laws [of 1973]. Black preachers and politicians, thousands of African Americans, favored and voted for such laws. But look where they led.”How did Henson Scales come to produce his book, which morphed into an exhibition associated with Art Basel, on display in Miami’s Black Overtown neighborhood, across from the Red Rooster Restaurant?“Well,” he said, “Four years ago, not long after my mother’s death, my family was preparing our house for sale. It’s a cool place, big enough to have a ballroom and a darkroom too. In one spot they discovered this stash of 40 rolls of film. They reasoned it was mine. And it was. I was so glad they were not lost.“This stuff dated from the late-1960s. I was around 14, a high-school freshman. My dad was a hobbyist photographer and my mother was a painter. Even before I turned 11, when dad gave me a Leica camera, both patiently instructed me. That earliest footage of mine contained a mixed bag of images. There were people and places I hoped to remember. I photographed protest and riots in my home city of Berkeley, California. Sly and the Family Stone and other acts that appeared at the Fillmore, across the bay in San Francisco, were represented too. And then among it all, was this cache of 15 sleeves with negatives showing various aspects of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. The two of us, we grew up together.”Oakland and Berkeley, Haight-Ashbury, the Castro, LA, the summer of love, women’s liberation, Vietnam, uprisings in urban ghettos.“They were,” recalls Scales, “all of a piece. But the Panthers were the coolest people.”He seems caught up in the dynamic of art utilized in the service of action and change, taking note of great style.“The whole presentation with the leather jackets, the berets. They were very cool. You had the hippies … and then you had the Black Panthers … and it was very powerful … The movement was feeling like we could change society. We could have an effect. It was a very exciting place to be. It was dangerous because of police violence against the Panthers … As a teenager that’s all very exciting because you’re not that concerned with safety like you are as you get older.”In discussion, Henson Scales squarely addressed this short-lived Black empowerment movement’s flaws, its misogyny, homophobia, infighting and FBI infiltration. By contrast, his book is more a testament to the group’s strides in overcoming such drawbacks. In pursuit of recognition, handsome Huey P Newton, the Panther’s minister of defense and co-founder, stressed the value of alliances among all oppressed outcasts:.css-rj2jmf{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#866D50;}Whatever your personal opinions and your insecurities about homosexuality and the various liberation movements among homosexuals and women (and I speak of the homosexuals and women as oppressed groups), we should try to unite with them in a revolutionary fashion. I say ‘whatever your insecurities are’ because as we very well know, sometimes our first instinct is to want to hit a homosexual in the mouth, and want a woman to be quiet. We want to hit a homosexual in the mouth because we are afraid that we might be homosexual; and we want to hit the women or shut her up because we are afraid that she might castrate us, or take the nuts that we might not have to start with.”Coming to boast a membership of more than 10,000, 50% of whom were women, the Panther party shone a spotlight on police and political corruption, brutality and injustice, a story also related in a film by an early Panthers member, Henson Scales’s Harlem neighbor Stanley Nelson.The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution debuted in 2015. It elaborates on the party’s wide-ranging social programs. They established community support systems including food and clothing banks, clinics, transport for families of inmates, legal seminars. In the 70s the Panther’s Free Breakfast for Children, nationwide, fed thousands. All this was achieved amid near-constant surveillance by police and J Edgar Hoover of the FBI, who demonized the BPP as “the greatest internal threat to national security”.The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution review – blistering account of a misunderstood movementRead moreRather than giving a daily rundown of all they did and didn’t do, Henson Scales’ portrayals show these revolutionaries as part of the pantheon of Black valor.When Viola Davis’s recent film The Woman King appeared, many critics were astonished. Projected to gross around $12m in its opening week, it grossed $19.05m. Worldwide, the “history-based” epic has earned nearly $100m. A similarly misunderstood historical fantasy, the astutely named, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, has earned more than three times that.As history, both are unashamedly inventive and melodramatic – much like Shakespeare. The “African-inspired” costuming and architecture is highly inauthentic. Heavy reliance on spectacle is akin to Braveheart or Gladiator. Resoundingly praised performances notwithstanding, some have wondered aloud about the appeal of such movies to Black people.If African American motivations and culture seem inscrutable to many, they ought not. Only now are we both able and fully prepared to embrace our heritage.In a Time of Panthers is an arresting look at some mighty heroes from the recent past. We revere them along with never-enslaved Blacks and those held in captivity. We celebrate our ancestors and adhere to Neo-Africanism. Whether such sources are accurately drawn or totally fabricated, the inspiration we take is legitimate. This is today’s aesthetic and intellectual answer to white supremacy’s neo-classical domination: a realization that we too are the heirs of greatness.
      In a Time of Panthers: Early Photographs by Jeffrey Henson Scales is published in the US by SPQR Editions
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      The Disappearing World of Wolfgang Tillmans

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      It doesn’t seem like a titillating photograph: an orderly queue of Germans, waiting to enter a nondescript industrial site. It is dark. Just a single light illuminates the door. What does it look like? Like a color remake of Depression-era imagery: the factory entrance, the bread line.But the men in single file — they are all men — are at this factory not to work but to play. This old train shed in the former East Berlin has been reborn as Snax, a raunchy gay nightclub, and that light in the darkness is the gateway to pleasure. It’s 2001 now, the wall is a memory. The world is flat, we are young and proud. We got here on a train, there are no more border controls, or maybe we got here on a cheap new airline called easyJet.We are ready to dance, and to do other things in the dark. The party will go on well past sunrise. It feels like it might go on forever.Wolfgang Tillmans, “Outside Snax Club,” 2001.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, London“Outside Snax Club” (2001) is one little star in a constellation of photographs by Wolfgang Tillmans at the Museum of Modern Art: one node in a life’s network of tender portraits, straightforward still lifes and streaky abstractions. The sky from a window seat. A boy’s feet in tube socks. An apple tree in the London morning, a kiss stolen in the London night. The German photographer has been taking these deceptively natural pictures since 1986, and linking them in exhibitions and books that absorb different modes of photography into idiosyncratic associations. These have made Tillmans (especially to gay audiences) not just a renowned artist, but someone we feel we know personally. He is just “Wolfgang,” even to many who have never met him; his photos are intimacy enough.“Wolfgang Tillmans: To Look Without Fear,” which opens to museum members this weekend and to the public Monday, is one of the most anticipated exhibitions of the year; actually, it’s been anticipated longer than that. Roxana Marcoci, a MoMA senior curator, has been working since 2014 on this tremendous, pandemic-detained overview, the largest of Tillmans’s career. It rambles across the museum’s sixth floor, vacant for more than a year and a half. It includes 417 works (mostly photographs, though there are a few minor videos) displayed, as always with Tillmans, in asymmetric arrays of large and small prints. He affixes the majority to the wall with Scotch tape or bulldog clips — although, as with the soft lighting and easy cropping of his photography, the ostensibly “informal” hang is actually calculated to the quarter-inch.Tillmans presents his photographs taped to or clipped to the wall, and prints them anew for each exhibition. Left, “Deer Hirsch” (1995). Right, “Smokin’ Jo” (1995). Emile Askey/The Museum of Modern Art, New York“Omen” (1991), printed at small scale and taped to the side of a free-standing gallery wall of the Museum of Modern Art.Lila Barth for The New York TimesThe show is candid, unaffected, breezily intelligent; moralistic, too, in the later galleries. It is required viewing for both photography scholars and sportswear fetishists, and a worthy retrospective of one of the most significant artists to emerge at the end of the last century. (The show will tour next year to Toronto and San Francisco.)It is also — in a way I was not prepared for — one of the saddest museum exhibitions I have ever attended. It is a show of friends lost, of technologies abandoned, of cities grown insular, of principles forsaken. It maps, over 35 years, the ascent of a photographer to the height of his profession, and then the disintegration of almost everything he loved, the art form of photography not least among them.We follow the fragile peace of the ’90s into a century of war, extremism, post-truth and privation. We follow the artist through the last days of the darkroom and the rise of digital cameras, which he adopted with only moderate success. A sunset in Puerto Rico, a club night in Hackney, the transit of Venus, liquid concrete before it hardens: “To Look Without Fear” confirms that Tillmans has always been a photographer of transience, of things here today and gone tomorrow. Now his two hometowns, Berlin and London, are both facing frigid winters with life-threatening power shortages, and his whole world feels on the cusp of vanishing.Tillmans was born in 1968 in the industrial heartland of West Germany. He had a childhood love of astronomy, acquiring his first telescope at age 12, and of British pop groups like New Order and Culture Club that inspired a lifelong passion for London. (In 1983, on an exchange program in the British capital, the 14-year-old Tillmans somehow got past the bouncer at the gay nightclub Heaven, but left early to get the last Tube home.)The artist considers “Lacanau (self),” from 1986, to be his first self-portrait. Lila Barth for The New York Times“Selbstportrait (Self-portrait),” from 1988, when Tillmans was 20.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, London“Faltenwurf (Keithstrasse),” a 2021 example of Tillmans’s drapery studies.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, London.Photography came more accidentally. On the beach in France one summer, Tillmans aimed a point-and-shoot camera at his flexed knee and silky black Adidas shorts: a first, abstracted self-portrait. That picture is in the first room at MoMA, and one of the funnier leitmotifs of “To Look Without Fear” is the three stripes of the Adidas logo, a queer sportswear fixation that endures even as cities and bodies change. At the show’s entrance we see the 20-year-old Tillmans in a skimpy red Adidas bathing suit. At its exit is a photograph from three decades later of another, crumpled pair of glistening red Adidas shorts: a drapery study, a memento mori.He moved to Britain for art school but got his break in magazines, shooting raves, festivals, and also fashion editorials. The London indie magazine i-D first published this show’s well-traveled photographs of his friends Lutz and Alex, gripping each other’s androgynous bodies. A giant portrait of the British DJ Smokin’ Jo, her silver sequined dress twinkling in the golden hour, was a commission for Interview. There were new gay magazines like Attitude, for which he photographed Tony Blair, and Butt, which printed his images of half-dressed fashion designers on pink paper, like a not-safe-for-work Financial Times.“Lutz & Alex sitting in the trees” (1992), a double portrait of Tillmans’s childhood friends.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, LondonHe was shooting on 35 mm rather than in large formats; he disdained the tripod, abjured conspicuous lighting. Nan Goldin comes to mind before some of his halcyon ’90s pictures, and she herself appears with two nudes in a 1996 Tillmans idyll: a millennial remake of Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe.” But he’s far less diaristic than Goldin, and a more relevant influence may be the New Objectivity of 1920s Berlin, where painters and photographers like Christian Schad and Otto Dix made a virtue of hard surfaces and louche life.His partyers are often standing still. His nudes are almost always staged. The same cool, surface-level gaze falls upon the windows of London skyscrapers, the water of pools and oceans, and the great love of his youth, the painter Jochen Klein. Klein appears in two of this show’s largest prints: “Deer Hirsch” (1995), a rare black-and-white photograph of Klein and a young buck, staring wondrously at each other on an empty beach, and “Jochen taking a bath” (1997), shot months before his death from AIDS-related pneumonia. (The memory of that photo haunts a 2015 image of the singer Frank Ocean, another sad young man with closely cropped hair against white tiles.)Wolfgang Tillmans, “Jochen taking a bath,” 1997.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, London“Frank, in the shower” (2015), depicting the singer Frank Ocean.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, LondonWhat mattered more than the photographer’s subjects was the photographer’s regard. It was applied equally, unobtrusively, across genres — portrait, landscape, nude, still life — and united in the taped-up arrangements he first tried out in 1993. All together, on the gallery wall, the modest photographs could express a new, politically and sexually charged way of being in the world. They were promiscuous: not (or not only) in the word’s libertine sense, but freely mixing, ready to be rearranged, most themselves when with others. They were urban, too, and came to typify a newly vibrant and international London, where the mammoth Tate Modern opened in 2000 and, in the same year, Tillmans became the first non-British laureate of the Turner Prize.Later, in the 2005 exhibition “Truth Study Center,” Tillmans introduced a new display module that mixed his photographs with newspaper clippings (about war, fundamentalism, and also scientific breakthroughs) on low wooden tables. With these didactic works he meant to resist the absolutes of Bush-Blair rhetoric, but they ended up as preachy show-and-tell displays: a first act in the 21st-century domestication of Tillmans’s youthful freedom. Anyway, by the time of “Truth Study Center,” different and more disruptive photographic arrangements were coming into view on our (desktop) screens. The tacked-up pictures and the carefully laid-out tables would give way to the image-search grid and the social feed. Tillmans’s unframed printouts were becoming atavistic. The independent magazines where he found his voice were on their last legs.“Freischwimmer 26,” 2003. The abstract work is one of a series of pictures Tillmans has made without a camera, by exposing photo paper to lasers and other light sources.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, LondonHis most powerful response to this century’s explosion of images has been the cameraless “Freischwimmer” abstractions, begun in 2003. So beautiful, these pictures: grand, streaky expanses of color, suggesting bodies or currents, made by exposing photosensitive paper to lasers and other hand-held lights. Yet something began to go sour in the Tillmans method around the time of his adoption of a digital camera in 2008. Large, colorful prints of a Shanghai street or an Argentine shantytown are too crisp, artificially alienated. Recent portraits, such as the Frank Ocean photograph, forsake the soft-focus intimacy of the ’90s for hard-candy sheen. The later party pictures are really dreadful: The black tones have lost all their mystery, the sex appeal has drained, and in a time of ubiquitous cameraphones his no-style style feels redundant.Absent at MoMA, though discussed in Marcoci’s catalog, is Tillmans’s most widely seen digital endeavor: his posters for the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. Made in a season of now justified panic, these balmy images of jet-trail-crossed skies or the cliffs of Dover, overlaid with pleas for apathetic youth to vote Remain, were freely distributed online. “What is lost is lost forever,” read the caption on the most ethereal of these posters, and he wasn’t kidding. With Brexit, the imagery of borders introduced earlier that decade — the concrete walls of Gaza, the customs line at Gatwick — arrived at Tillmans’s doorstep. He thought the lack of artifice, the pictures everyone could read, might inspire people to live together; it turned out he was speaking a language narrower than he’d ever known. A 2021 photo of worn-out maroon passports (the color of all E.U. member states’ travel documents; the Johnson government replaced Britain’s with a blue one) might as well be a grave marker for Tillmans’s London. Some people really did have more freedoms when they were young.Recent works by Wolfgang Tillmans at MoMA, including, at center, “Kae Tempest” (2021).Lila Barth for The New York TimesWe all age. We all lose things. And yet I don’t blame Tillmans at all for considering, as he tells my colleague Matthew Anderson in this Sunday’s New York Times, that he might take a sabbatical and leave art for electoral politics. The democratic impulse in his photography, manifested through simple commercial lenses and unpretentious printouts, has receded into self-righteousness now, and his collisions of self-portraits, celebrity pictures, handsome sunsets and political slogans — well, how can these retain their force when a hundred million social media profiles do the same? He has reached the end of something, summed up with panache and great melancholy in this important show, and his accomplishment, not unlike E.U. membership, is easier to appreciate once it’s lost. Those late, sweaty ’90s nights: then, we were sure we had met the chronicler of a new millennium’s freedoms. What if Tillmans was instead a harbinger of the artist as entrepreneur of the self, and of how we would all go on posting pictures even as our misfortunes piled up offscreen?Wolfgang Tillmans: To Look Without FearOpens to members Sept. 9 and to the public Sept. 12 through Jan. 1, 2023, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, Manhattan, (212) 708-9400, moma.org. More

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      in Elections

      What This Portrait of Mayor Adams's Mother Means to New Yorkers

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      Dorothy Mae Adams-Streeter posed for a portrait at her 75th birthday party. Her image, floating in a brandy snifter, has a powerful resonance.On New Year’s Day, when Eric Adams was sworn in as the 110th mayor of New York City, in his right hand he raised high above his head a framed portrait of his mother, Dorothy Mae Adams-Streeter, pictured in a brandy snifter. His left hand rested over her Bible, where she kept notes, letters and old pictures.“I was raising my right hand, lifting her up, as she lifted me up,” Mr. Adams said in an interview. “Who would think that eventually, because of what she instilled in her son, that he would be in Times Square, being sworn in as the mayor and holding up her photo?”The brandy snifter portrait is as American as hip-hop, acid-washed jeans and plastic-covered sofas. A photo in that style could conjure the same feelings that oversize shoulder pads or a Jheri curl would: cringe. In 2001, the motif was spoofed by “Saturday Night Live” in a skit that featured Alec Baldwin and Jimmy Fallon, called “Put It in a Brandy Snifter.”But in the 1980s and 1990s, the brandy snifter photo was an innovative, attainable luxury, and it became ubiquitous in some communities. Its cultural significance is closely tied to the ambitions of the American working class.Mr. Adams’s tribute to his mother also honored the countless other people who see that image and immediately recognize and identify with it, as I did. In 1995, my siblings and I had our own brandy snifter portraits taken at our local CTown supermarket on 135th Street and Broadway.I wore my peach Easter dress from earlier that year. My mother tied my hair in a ponytail and curled my bangs to the side. My siblings wore polo shirts. The day before, I had applied a glow-in-the-dark, temporary tattoo I got in a box of Rude Dudes bubble gum to my cheek. My face has never been scrubbed harder than Mom scrubbed it clean that day.We had to be spotless. The front of our CTown turned into a photo studio only once a year, from what I remember.The makeshift studio where a photographer from Sears took our portraits was in an entryway where the shopping carts were usually stored, my mother told me recently. The backdrop was light blue, and the area smelled like bread. When we got the photos back some time later, our small cherubic faces were trapped in brandy snifters and adhered onto a plaque made from a composite that resembled wood. Mom still keeps the plaque on her dresser.The writer, Sandra E. Garcia, was a little girl when a brandy snifter portrait of her was taken at a supermarket in Harlem.Photo illustration by Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesWhile now it might seem crass to place the portrait of a child in an image of a brandy snifter, for my mother it was an opportunity to provide us with something that she never had: a photo shoot.I have never seen photos of my parents as children. During their youth, cameras and photos were not in reach for the poor in the Dominican Republic, where they were raised. It was important for my mother to capture us professionally in this way. The portraits were her aspirations for her children to have more than she did, manifested in a photo.It is the same ambition, that of Black and immigrant working-class communities, the heart of the Democratic base and New York City, that won Mr. Adams the mayoral election last year. The photo illustrates what he told voters during his victory speech: “I am you. After years of praying and hoping and struggling and working, we are headed to City Hall.”The choice to hold that photo while he was sworn in was more than a salute to his mother; it was a knowing nod to the communities that have been sometimes shut out by city government but continue to toil for progress.“I wanted everyone to look at that photo and think about their parents and see that we all want the same thing,” Mr. Adams said.Earlier this week, Mr. Adams was criticized for calling low-wage workers “low- skill workers.” The mayor later said that his critics had distorted his message. On Twitter, he reminded those who were offended by his comments that he was once a low-wage worker.“I was a cook. I was a dishwasher. If nobody came to my restaurant when I was in college, I wouldn’t have been able to survive,” he wrote.Mayor Adams carried his mother’s portrait as he voted on Election Day in November.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesIt is that part of his identity that is connected to these simple, antiquated portraits. Brandy snifter photos were a special occasion, something to get dressed up for.At a celebration of her 75th birthday in 2013, Dorothy Mae Adams-Streeter, then a retired housekeeper, arrived, dressed to the nines in a bone-colored blazer with a black trim and a silver tiara atop her head.Inside the Sugar Hill Restaurant & Supper Club on Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn, they served smothered chicken, ribs, cornbread, collard greens with smoked turkey and macaroni and cheese. The O’Jays played from speakers, according to Aaron Freeman, who now runs the restaurant that his father, Eddie Freeman, opened in 1942.“She welcomed everybody with open arms,” Aaron Freeman said. “As you can see, she’s just the rock of the family.”In her portrait, her smile, captured that evening, is one of delight.“I remember the day like yesterday,” Mr. Adams said. “She cleaned houses and did all sorts of work just to make sure she could provide for her children. To be able to take a day and do for her was a great moment.”Incoming N.Y.C. Mayor Eric Adams’s New AdministrationCard 1 of 7Schools Chancellor: David Banks. More