Elliott Erwitt
The Magnum photographer who built a career on the ability to see what was absurd in the serious, and what was serious in the absurd.
Elliott Erwitt spent seven decades finding the comic and the melancholy inside the same frame — the couple at odds in the background, the dog in the foreground who steals the picture, the moment that is entirely ordinary and entirely strange. He was one of the most widely published photographers of the twentieth century, and one of the most difficult to imitate.
Origins
Erwitt was born in 1928 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, to Russian Jewish émigré parents. The family moved to Milan, and in 1939 — just ahead of the war — to the United States. He grew up in Los Angeles, studied at Los Angeles City College, and then moved to New York, where he briefly studied film at the New School under the GI Bill.
His photographic education was practical: he worked as a darkroom assistant, met Edward Steichen at MoMA and Roy Stryker (the organiser of the Farm Security Administration photographic project), and absorbed the American documentary tradition through proximity rather than formal study. By the early 1950s he was producing the kind of images that would define his career — candid, precise, and quietly funny.
Magnum and commercial work
Erwitt joined Magnum Photos in 1953 at the invitation of Robert Capa. He would serve as the organisation's president three times, a measure of his colleagues' trust and of his administrative competence alongside his photographic one.
For commercial clients — Volkswagen, Perrier, and many others — he brought the same wry intelligence to his editorial work: a Volkswagen Beetle photographed to look absurd against its own advertising ambitions, an ice cube that tells a story. The advertising work was respected partly because it was obviously made by someone who was first a photographer, not an art director.
I don't think there is anything particularly wrong with photographing things that make you laugh.
The photographs
Among the most discussed photographs in his archive: the image of Soviet Premier Khrushchev and US Vice President Nixon in the kitchen of a model American home at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow — the "Kitchen Debate" — which Erwitt shot at close range, catching the physicality of two political systems in argument. And the many photographs of dogs — Chihuahuas at ankle height, dogs at people-height, dogs in cars — a body of work that has its own books (Dog Dogs, Snaps) and its own logic: the dog is usually calmer and better composed than the humans around it.
He made documentary films alongside his still work, and produced many books over a career spanning the 1950s to the 2020s. He died in New York in November 2023 at the age of ninety-five.
