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      in Elections

      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

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      in US Politics

      Our favorite photos from 2021: how Guardian US pictures captured a historic year

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      Our photographers captured many moving and inspirational moments in 2021. Here’s our pick of the most striking imagesby Gail Fletcher and Alvin ChangIn 2021, our photographers told some of the most profound stories in America. They captured personal moments, like a man assessing the remnants of his home after Hurricane Ida. There were inspirational stories, like how a majority Black high school created a girls lacrosse team during the pandemic. And there were historic scenes, like the lead-up to the presidential inauguration just weeks after insurrectionists tried to overturn the election results. Thank you to all the photographers who worked with us this year.US cities are suffocating in the heat. Now they want retributionThe city of Baltimore is suing oil and gas companies for their role in the climate crisis, which has had an outsized impact on community of color. The image below shows Karen Lewis, who says her row house in Baltimore can get so hot that sometimes she has trouble breathing.Photographer: Greg KahnBallparks, stadiums and race tracks: US mass vaccination sites – in picturesPhotographer Filip Wolak took aerial photos of mass Covid-19 vaccination sites around the US. The Delta Flight Museum in Atlanta was selected as one of Georgia’s four mass vaccination sites beginning 22 February 2021.Photographer: Filip WolakAfter slavery, oystering offered a lifeline. Now sewage spills threaten to end it allRaw sewage leaks in Virginia have threatened the livelihoods of the few remaining Black oyster-people on the east coast. These leaks can be seen draining through neighborhoods, like this culvert that connects the historic African American Pughsville neighborhood to the larger drainage system. Below is five-year-old Braxton Miller swinging above the water.Photographer: Alyssa SchukarA quiet revolution: the female imams taking over an LA mosqueIn some mosques, women aren’t allowed to pray in the same room as men; in some mosques, women can’t even pray inside. But female imams in Los Angeles are pushing those boundaries with mixed congregation mosques and LBGTQ mosques, and using their sermons to talk about topics like sexual violence and pregnancy loss. Below are Nurjahan Boulden, Tasneem Noor and Samia Bano after praying together in Venice, California.Photographer: Anna BoyiazisThe preparation for an inauguration like no other – a photo essayThe Guardian asked photographer Jordan Gale to document the lead-up to the presidential inauguration, which happened just weeks after insurrectionists tried to overturn the election results on 6 January 2021. Below are steel gates blocking off parts of Pennsylvania Avenue leading up to the US Capitol and a woman looking through a security checkpoint.Photographer: Jordan GaleSalmon face extinction throughout the US west. Blame these four damsFour closely spaced damns in eastern Washington state are interfering with salmon migration. Below, salmon are seen swimming through the viewing area at Lower Granite Dam Fish Ladder Visitor Center in Pomeroy, Washington.Photographer: Mason TrincaThe California mothers fighting for a home in a pandemic – photo essayIn this photo essay about the precarious nature of America’s safety net, Cherokeena Robinson, 32 – who lost her job during the pandemic – lays in bed with her son Mai’Kel Stephens, 6, at their transitional house in San Pedro, California that they share with one or two other families at a time.Photographer: Rachel BujalskiA tiny Alaska town is split over a goldmine. At stake is a way of lifeIn Haines, Alaska, a mining project promised jobs, but some are worried contamination from the mine could destroy the salmon runs they rely on. In the photo below, a seagull flies above hundreds of spawning chum salmon on a slough of the Chilkat River, just below the Tlingit village of Klukwan.Photographer: Peter Mather‘Sad and so unfair’: Palestinian Americans celebrate a painful EidFor Palestinian American Muslims, the conclusion to the Muslim holy month of Ramadan is supposed to be a time of celebration. This year, the violence in Gaza and Jerusalem made it a somber event. The photo on the left is Tiffany Cabán, who would eventually win a seat on the New York city council. On the tight are Muslim greetings each other after morning Eid al-Fitr prayers.Photographer: Ismail Ferdous‘This is a spectacular chorus’: walk into the cicada explosionTrillions of periodic cicada emerged this year after a 17-year dormancy underground along the eastern US. In the photograph below, cicadas swarm the trees near a home in Columbia, Maryland.Photographer: Gabriella DemczukHow a majority Black school in Detroit shook up the world of lacrosseDetroit Cass Technical high school, where the student body is 85% Black, only offered three spring sports for girls – until a group of girls asked the administration to add lacrosse. It was a unique request; while it’s a Native American game, most participants are white. This story is about this team’s two-year journey to get on the field and, eventually, win. Below, clockwise, are Kayla Carroll-Williams, 15, Zahria Liggans, 18, Alexia Carroll-Williams, 17, and Deja Crenshaw, 18.Photographer: Sylvia JarrusA chemical firm bought out these Black and white US homeowners – with a significant disparityIn 2012, the South African chemical firm Sasol announced plans to build a complex in Mossville, Louisiana. They bought out the homes of people who lived on that land, but an analysis found that they offered significantly less money to Black homeowners than white homeowners. The image on the right shows Eyphit Hadnot, 58, and his older brother Dellar Hadnot, 61. The Hadnot family lived in Mossville for 80 years when Sasol offered them the buyout, which they rejected. On the left is a plot of land where a home used to stand before Sasol leveled the building.Photographer: Christian K Lee‘Ida is not the end’: Indigenous residents face the future on Louisiana’s coast – photo essayThe communities of Pointe-aux-Chenes and Isle de Jean Charles suffered some of Hurricane Ida’s worst destruction. That left then with a hard question: Stay to rebuild, or leave? The photo shows Kip de’Laune searching for any salvageable items at his home in Point-Aux-Chenes after Hurricane Ida.Photographer: Bryan TarnowskiShe survived Hurricane Sandy. Then climate gentrification hitAfter Hurricane Sandy, Kimberly White Smalls hoped the city would help her rebuild her home in New York’s Far Rockaway neighborhood. Instead, the only option she was left with was to sell the house to the city. Below are Smalls’ grandsons – Donovan E Smalls, 9, left, and Kelsey E Smalls Jr, 8 – running down the street in Far Rockaway, Queens.Photographer: Krisanne JohnsonTopicsPhotographyUS politicsCoronavirusClimate crisisCaliforniaAlaskaReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      The secret history of Sesame Street: ‘It was utopian – it’s part of who we all are’

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      In 1970, David Attie was sent to photograph the birth of the kids’ landmark TV show as part of a cold war propaganda drive by the US government. But these newly found images are just one part of the programme’s radical historyby Steve Rose“I’m still pinching myself that my dad, my own flesh and blood, had Ernie on one hand and Bert on the other,” Eli Attie says. “It is like he got to sit at Abbey Road studios and watch the Beatles record I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Attie’s father was the photographer David Attie who, in 1970, visited the set of Sesame Street in New York City during its first season. His images lay forgotten in a wardrobe for the next 50 years, until Eli recently discovered them. They are a glimpse behind the curtain of a cultural phenomenon waiting to happen. Here are not only Bert and Ernie but Kermit, Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch with his original orange fur (he was green by season two). And here are the people who brought these characters to life, chiefly Jim Henson and Frank Oz, the Lennon and McCartney of Muppetdom. What also stands out in Attie’s images are the children visiting the set. As in the show itself, they are clearly so beguiled by the puppets, they completely ignore the humans controlling them.Eli himself was one of those visitors, although he has no memory of it. “I was in diapers, and as the story goes, I was loud and not to be quieted down, and was yanked off the set,” he says. His parents and older brother Oliver at least made it into the photos. Oliver was even in an episode of the show, in the background in Hooper’s Store, Eli explains, with just a hint of jealousy.Fifty-two years and more than 4,500 episodes later, Sesame Street remains the premier address in children’s entertainment. It is still watched by hundreds of millions around the world, and broadcast in more than 140 countries. One attempt to statistically measure the show’s impact on American society failed because nobody could find a large enough sample group who hadn’t watched it. Sesame Street’s place in US culture was bizarrely underlined last month when Big Bird announced on Twitter: “I got the Covid-19 vaccine today! My wing is feeling a little sore, but it’ll give my body an extra protective boost that keeps me and others healthy.” He was promoting the rollout of vaccinations to five- to 11-year-olds, but Big Bird’s tweet, combined with Sesame Street’s recent introduction of a new Korean American muppet, has prompted a conservative backlash. Texas senator Ted Cruz responded: “Government propaganda … for your 5 year old!” Cruz later doubled down, tweeting a cartoon of the Sesame Street characters sitting around the Thanksgiving dinner table, with a dead, cooked Big Bird in place of a turkey.Others piled in. The influential Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) expressly banned Big Bird and other Sesame Street characters from its next conference, and CPAC organiser Matt Schlapp called for PBS, which broadcasts the show (although new episodes now air on HBO Max), to be defunded. “They just won’t stop in their push for woke politics,” he complained. Arizona state senator Wendy Rogers went even further, declaring: “Big Bird is a communist.”Beyond the optics of beating up on universally beloved children’s characters, in the context of David Attie’s images, these takes could hardly be more wrong. Attie had been commissioned to photograph Sesame Street by Amerika, a Russian-language magazine funded by the US state department and distributed in the Soviet Union. Essentially, it was a cold war propaganda project. Soviet officials would regularly return copies of Amerika to the US embassy unsold, saying their citizens were not interested. In truth, the magazine was so sought after, it became a black-market commodity, explains Eli Attie. “One embassy official said to me they had traded two copies of Amerika for these impossible-to-find ballet tickets in Moscow at the time,” he says. So Sesame Street was used as government propaganda, just not in the way Cruz and Rogers might imagine.You could say that Sesame Street had a political mission from the outset, as the new documentary, Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street (to which Attie’s book is a companion piece), lays out. One of the show’s co-founders, the broadcaster Joan Ganz Cooney, was involved “intellectually and spiritually” with the civil rights movement. The other, psychologist Lloyd Morrisett, was concerned about a widening education gap in the 1960s US, which was leaving behind socioeconomically deprived children, particularly African Americans. These children were often spending long hours at home watching television while their parents were busy working. Instead of jingles for beer commercials, Cooney and Morrisett reasoned, why not use television to teach them literacy and numeracy?With an $8m federal grant, the newly formed Children’s Television Workshop spent two years researching how to make content that would not only be educational but entertaining. That’s where The Muppet Workshop came in (even if the hippy-ish Henson was initially distrusted by his more academic colleagues). Not to mention the songs, the anarchic comedy sketches, the surreal animations, and the improvised child-with-muppet segments. The whole thing was an experiment. Nothing like it had been done before and there was no guarantee it would be a success, but everyone seemed to be on the same page.As Cooney puts it in the documentary: “We weren’t so worried about reaching middle-class children but we really, really wanted to reach inner-city kids badly. It was hardly worth doing if it didn’t reach them.” This explains why the show was set on an ordinary New York street – a radical move for children’s TV, a familiar place for the target audience. Equally radically, the show was multicultural and inclusive from the start, with white, Black and Latino actors alongside non-human characters of all colours. Even the title sequence and the guests reflected the US’s diversity (the first season featured James Earl Jones, BB King, Mahalia Jackson and Jackie Robinson). As the long-running writer and director Jon Stone said of the show’s inclusive approach: “We’ve never beaten that horse to death by talking about it; we simply show it.”Sesame Street has taught kids about all manner of life topics. Not only racism (most recently with the introduction of two new African American characters, post-Black Lives Matter) but also poverty, addiction, autism, HIV and Aids, public health (Covid was not Big Bird’s first jab, he also got a measles vaccination in 1972), and gentrification (in 1994, the street was under threat of demolition from a loud-mouthed property tycoon named “Ronald Grump”, played by Joe Pesci). Sesame Street has even tackled the concept of death: when Will Lee, who played storekeeper Mr Hooper, died in 1982, the show featured a wrenching segment in which neighbours, clearly tearfully, explain to Big Bird that Mr Hooper is dead and is never coming back.It wasn’t just “inner-city kids” Sesame Street was popular with. While his father was working, Eli Attie’s artist mother would also put him and his brother in front of the TV to watch it so she could paint. “There was a block of hours that it was on public broadcasting stations in the New York region. So she just thought: ‘Hallelujah. I can place them here, they’re entertained,’” he says. “We were learning to count, we were learning to spell and we were learning a kind of comedy: we both became fans of Monty Python and standup comedy and I’m sure this was the gateway.” Attie went on to become a TV writer and producer, working on shows such as The West Wing, House and Billions.Sesame Street’s inclusive, humane, progressive agenda has always had its enemies. Mississippi broadcasters refused to air the first season back in 1969 on account of the show’s desegregated setting (they backed down after a few weeks). In the past decade, the conservative chorus of disapproval has been getting louder. Before Cruz and co, the show and PBS have been targeted by the likes of Mitt Romney, Fox News, and, inevitably, Donald Trump.“Sesame has never been a political show; it has been a very socially relevant show,” says Trevor Crafts, producer of the Street Gang documentary. Although the political climate today has echoes of the 1960s, when Sesame Street was created, he feels. “It was a very similar time. There was a lot of social unrest, and here we are again. It just shows that you need something like Sesame Street to sort of increase the volume of good in the world. And also to know that through creativity, you can make change. Positive change can occur if you’re willing to see a problem and try to fix it and do it creatively.”Where some might see a political agenda, many more would simply see a model for the kind of society the US would like to be. “I think it showed everybody: ‘This is who we should be in our hearts,’” Eli Attie says. “It was utopian. It was optimistic, it was challenging and smart. And it didn’t talk down to children.” As well as a family album, his father’s photos capture that spirit of playful idealism. “I see now that’s part of who I am,” he says. “And it’s part of who we all are.” TopicsChildren’s TVUS televisionTelevisionPhotographyThe MuppetsArt and design booksfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Netanyahu’s Road Through Israel’s History, in Pictures

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      “Bibi, King of Israel!”That is a shout from his fervent supporters that might have given pause to King David, let alone King Solomon. But Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, has finally lost his job, unable to cobble together a final majority in the Knesset after four elections in the last two years.The government that has now replaced him is fragile, however. Little holds it together except a desire to get Mr. Netanyahu out of office, where he will no longer be immune from punishment, if convicted, over charges of corruption.But Mr. Netanyahu still appears to rule Israel’s largest party, Likud, and given Israel’s riven politics, his fall may only be a sort of sabbatical.Whatever the criticism of his actions and political cynicism, Mr. Netanyahu’s career represents an extraordinary accomplishment for a man who grew up in the shadow of a difficult and demanding father and a hero brother, killed at the age of 30 in command of one of Israel’s most storied military ventures, Operation Entebbe. The 1976 operation rescued hostages held at Entebbe Airport in Uganda.Both brothers served in the military’s elite commando unit, Sayeret Matkal. But Bibi survived to put a more lasting stamp on the young state through his political and economic policies, his toughness toward rivals. He has an instinctive sense of what drives Israelis — the search for security in one of the most unstable regions of the world, a Jewish state built on the remnants the Nazis left behind, in the midst of an Arab and Iranian sea.Mr. Netanyahu, right, during a training exercise as a member of the Israeli Army’s Sayeret Matkal commando unit.Israeli Government Press OfficeIsraeli troops patrol fields around a hijacked Sabena aircraft in Tel Aviv in 1972. Mr. Netanyahu’s commando unit, led by Ehud Barak, another future prime minister, rescued the passengers from hijackers.Associated PressMr. Netanyahu with his daughter Noa in 1980.Israeli Government Press OfficeMr. Netanyahu’s path to leadership was not an obvious one. Born in Israel, he grew up partly in the United States, where his father, a deeply conservative scholar of Judaic history, was teaching.He returned to Israel after high school, fluent in English, to make a distinguished career as a commando in Sayaret Matkal, where he rose to captain and was wounded several times.He then returned to the United States, using the more Anglicized name Ben Nitay (later changed to Benjamin Ben Nitai) to get degrees in architecture and business management. By 1978, he was already appearing on American television, where his English made him an ideal guest to discuss Israel.He found his way into diplomacy and politics in the early 1980s, when he was appointed deputy chief of mission to the Israeli Embassy in Washington. He then served as ambassador to the United Nations before returning to Israel to enter politics in earnest.He joined the Likud in 1988 and was elected to Parliament.Mr. Netanyahu, accompanied by Government Secretary Elyakim Rubinstein, on a flight from New York to Washington in 1989, when Mr. Netanyahu served as deputy foreign minister.Israeli Government Press OfficeRight-wing activists pasting campaign posters for Mr. Netanyahu over campaign posters for Prime Minister Shimon Peres in May 1996, before the election that would bring Mr. Netanyahu to power.David Silverman/ReutersBenjamin and Sara Netanyahu in Jerusalem on election day in 1996.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBy 1993, he was the leader of Likud and was a strong critic of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of the Labor party and his willingness to give up territory to reach peace with the Palestinians in the Oslo accords. After Mr. Rabin was assassinated in 1995, Mr. Netanyahu was criticized for language approaching incitement, a charge he said he found deeply wounding.But he defeated Washington’s favorite candidate, Shimon Peres, in the 1996 elections by pushing the theme of security in the midst of a badly managed conflict with Lebanon and a series of terrorist bombings by Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad. He became the youngest prime minister in Israeli history and the first to be born in the independent state.That same year, 1996, Mr. Netanyahu represented Israel for the first time in summit meetings organized by President Clinton, who was eager to build on Oslo to create a more lasting peace.Then and later, in the 1998 Wye River summit, Mr. Netanyahu proved a difficult partner. He was willing to appeal to American Jews and Israel supporters in Congress to heighten political pressure on Mr. Clinton not to press Israel to go farther than he judged wise.His relations with the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, were always tense, and the two never came to trust one another enough to reach the peace that Mr. Clinton thought was within grasp.Vice President Al Gore watching as Yasir Arafat, King Hussein of Jordan, President Clinton and Mr. Netanyahu leave the Oval Office after a Middle East summit meeting in 1996.Paul Hosefros/The New York TimesThe Israeli and Palestinian leaders failed to resolve any of their differences during the two-day summit.Doug Mills/Associated PressSurrounded by security personnel, Mr. Netanyahu, with his wife Sara and son Avner, spent a holiday at the beach in Caesarea in August 1997.Shaul Golan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhile Mr. Netanyahu did much to reform Israel’s economy, charges of corruption, both large and petty, surrounded him and hurt his popularity.After the failure of his Labor Party successor, Ehud Barak, to reach peace with the Palestinians at long meetings at Camp David and again, just before Mr. Clinton left office, Mr. Netanyahu returned to politics. But he lost out to Ariel Sharon, then went on to serve in his cabinet. After a period in opposition, Mr. Netanyahu became prime minister again in 2009 and has remained in office since.But his relations with American presidents continued to be fraught, and he and President Obama developed a deep mutual disdain.Mr. Obama pushed too hard too early to try to get Israel to stop settlement building in the occupied West Bank, while Mr. Netanyahu believed that Mr. Obama was putting Israel at an existential risk by trying to do a deal with Iran to curb its nuclear program.While Iran denied it was aiming to develop nuclear weapons, Mr. Netanyahu compared the threat of Iran to Israel and the Jews to the late 1930s in Europe, when Hitler took power.He tried to defeat the deal in every setting, from the United Nations, where he famously held up a cartoon bomb with a thick red line representing Iranian uranium enrichment, to the U.S. Congress itself, where he remained very popular, especially among Republicans.During his second tenure as prime minister, Mr. Netanyahu had an icy relationship with President Obama.Stephen Crowley/The New York TimesThe Iron Dome defense system being used to intercept incoming missiles fired from Gaza by Hamas militants in 2012.Tsafrir Abayov/Associated PressMr. Netanyahu, famous for his use of visual aids, displaying his red line for Iran’s nuclear program at the United Nations in 2012.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesMr. Netanyahu also dealt with the aftermath of Mr. Sharon’s decision to pull Israeli troops and settlers out of the Gaza Strip, a step he opposed. Mr. Sharon dumped the keys to Gaza in the street, but they were picked up by the more radical Hamas, which seized control of the Palestinian territory from the more moderate Fatah faction led by Mr. Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas.Under Mr. Netanyahu, Israel made regular raids and airstrikes to try to stop rockets from Gaza hitting southern Israel, prompting criticism about the deaths of Palestinian civilians in a place many compared to an open-air prison, largely sealed off from the world by Israel and Egypt.But Mr. Netanyahu has refrained from any comprehensive re-invasion of Gaza and has had quiet talks through Egyptian mediators with Hamas to try to keep Gaza from imploding and dragging Israel into a larger war, especially another one with the Iranian-armed Hezbollah militia in southern Lebanon.In the occupied West Bank, however, Israel continued to build a separation barrier between the Palestinians and ever-expanding settlements beyond the so-called Green Line, which delineated 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a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Mr. Netanyahu increasingly depended on political support from Israelis who supported the settlement expansion and their eventual annexation, which he threatened but never carried out.At the same time, he has been making inroads with other Sunni Arab nations despite the continuing decline in relations with the Palestinians, pushing Israel’s solidarity with them against Iran. One of his great accomplishments, working with President Trump, were the Abraham Accords, which opened normal diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.Those accords survived the most recent exchange of fire last month with Hamas in Gaza, an 11-day clash that seemed, for now, to put the Palestinian issue back on the table. But even that conflict did not save Mr. Netanyahu.An Israeli tank near the town of Sderot at the border with Gaza during the seven-week war with Hamas in 2014.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesMr. Netanyahu at the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament.Lior Mizrahi/Getty ImagesMr. Netanyahu visiting the border fence between Israel and Jordan in 2016.Pool photo by Marc Israel SellemSome say that Mr. Netanyahu has sought his whole life to grow out of shadow of his brother and to make his own mark on Israeli history. There are streets all over Israel named after Yonatan Netanyahu.Only when Mr. Netanyahu’s father, hawkish and dominating, died in 2012 at the age of 102, Israelis said the prime minister could feel liberated enough to try to make peace with the Palestinians.But that has been a hope long deferred, as previous efforts at peace have proven hollow. Both the Israelis and Palestinians have pulled back from the deeply difficult compromises, both territorial and religious, that would be required for a lasting settlement of the unfinished war of 1948-49.Mr. Netanyahu, with his father, Benzion Netanyahu, visiting the grave of his brother Yoni at Mount Herzl in 2009 in Jerusalem. Yoni Netanyahu was killed during military operations in Uganda in July 1976.Amos Ben Gershom/Government Press OfficeHar Homa, a Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem, has more than 25,000 residents.Tomas Munita for The New York TimesMr. Netanyahu used one of the most prominent platforms in the world, the United States Congress, to warn against what he called a “bad deal” being negotiated with Iran to freeze its nuclear program in 2015.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Netanyahu was an early supporter of Mr. Trump and his presidency was a triumph for the Israeli leader. Having the support of an American president is crucial for Israelis and Mr. Netanyahu campaigned on his strong relationship with Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump pulled the United States out of the Iran deal and, in an obvious effort to help Mr. Netanyahu in this latest campaign, moved the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in the 1967 war.But Mr. Trump’s defeat was a blow to Mr. Netanyahu. President Biden is trying to restore the Iran nuclear deal over fierce Israeli objections, intervened to press Mr. Netanyahu to bring an end to the latest Gaza clash and has repeated his support for a negotiated, two-state solution to the Palestinian issue.After President Trump’s election in 2016, Mr. Netanyahu found an ally in the White House.Stephen Crowley/The New York TimesProtesters seen through a banner showing Mr. Netanyahu in 2018.Oded Balilty/Associated PressMr. Netanyahu visiting a market in Jerusalem in 2019 during his campaign for a fifth term as prime minister.Dan Balilty for The New York TimesMr. Netanyahu remained in power so long not because Israelis think he is the nicest or cleanest man in the kingdom, but because they believed that he kept them safe and made them wealthier, and that he has succeeded in maintaining Israel’s security while reducing its isolation in the region.Mr. Netanyahu celebrating an election victory in 2020.Dan Balilty for The New York TimesMr. Netanyahu, right, with his lawyer at the Jerusalem district court in February during a hearing in his corruption trial.Pool photo by Reuven CastroIsrael’s Iron Dome missile defense system lights up the sky over Tel Aviv as it tries to intercept rockets fired from Gaza during the war last month.Corinna Kern for The New York TimesWhether or not he ever returns to power again, after Mr. Netanyahu dies, there will be many streets named after him, too.Benjamin Netanyahu shakes hands with the new prime minister, Naftali Bennett, after the Knesset approved the new coalition government on Sunday.Ronen Zvulun/Reuters More