How did this photo sum up the US-Soviet relationship?
Elliott Erwitt travelled to the Soviet Union and Cuba during the Cold War. In the eighth video of BBC Culture’s Through the Lens series, he describes his iconic photos of Richard Nixon, Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
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In 1959, Magnum photographer Elliott Erwitt snapped Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and then US Vice President Richard Nixon having a set-to at an exhibition in Moscow. The politicians were on a tour of the displays – created by the US to show the benefits of capitalism as part of a cultural exchange to promote understanding – when they stopped in front of a model kitchen and debated their two opposing ideologies.
In the aftermath of the spontaneous moment, nicknamed ‘the kitchen debate’, media coverage strengthened the resolve of both sides and boosted Nixon’s image, helping him to gain the presidential nomination the following year. On the centenary of Russia’s October Revolution, Erwitt talks to BBC Culture about photographing inside the Soviet Union, and what it was like to witness two world leaders having a spat during the Cold War.
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In this video, part of our Through the Lens series celebrating 70 years of Magnum Photos, he also describes taking pictures of the Cuban leader Fidel Castro and the Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara in Havana in 1964. “I didn’t speak so much, I listened more,” says Erwitt, whose Russian parents emigrated to the US in 1939. “Photographers shouldn’t get in the way of things – I hope that I was an observer rather than a participant.”
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