Elliott Erwitt, who passed away at his Manhattan residence on Wednesday at the age of 95, was an abnormality. Photographers who possess a comedic perspective on life are seldom lauded to the same extent as those who document war and destitution or exalt the natural world.
He produced visual gags with his camera for over six decades, stumbling upon relevant content while strolling. His astute observation of humorous and occasionally illuminating conjunctions—such as a dog in a cemetery supine on its back, a Coca-Cola machine glowing amidst a public exhibition of missiles in Alabama, or a potted plant in a shabby Miami Beach ballroom in a stately manner—gained him recurring engagements and the fondness of an audience that mirrored his endearing, Chaplin-like levity.
Over twenty of his works were published in black and white, and his prints are held in photography collections worldwide. Sasha Erwitt, his daughter, confirmed the demise.
Mr. Erwitt, whose witty photographs of dogs were published in books such as “Son of Bitch,” “To the Dogs,” and “Woof,” gained widespread recognition for depicting these canines as both solitary beings with individual preoccupations and affable human companions.
He conducted travel campaigns for Ireland and France and photographed luminaries (Humphrey Bogart, Jack Kerouac, Marilyn Monroe, Che Guevara) for Life, Look, and other publications.
A number of his photographs achieved notoriety. In 1963, at Arlington National Cemetery, one of his most renowned works depicts a veiled Jacqueline Kennedy clutching a folded American flag while attending the interment of President John F. Kennedy.
An even more widely recognized instance occurred in 1959 when Vice President Richard M. Nixon made contact with Soviet Premier Nikita S. Krushchev on the chest during an exhibition of American products in Moscow known as the “Kitchen Debate.”
(During the 1960 campaign, Republicans transformed the image into a poster, which infuriated the ardent anti-Nixon Mr. Erwitt. “It was utilized without my consent,” he stated subsequently. “I was enraged, but I was powerless to intervene.”
“Mother and Child” was the title of an additional memorable photograph from Edward Steichen’s landmark photo exhibition “The Family of Man” (and subsequent book) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Captured in 1953, the image depicts a woman reclining on a bed and gazing intently into the eyes of her infant, all the while a cat serenely observes the surroundings. Ellen, the infant, was the daughter of Mr. Erwitt, and the deceased in 2011 Lucienne Matthews was his first wife.
His work was displayed in museums from the 1960s until his demise, and he was awarded one-man exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the Barbican in London, and the Museum of Modern Art in Paris over the years. A thorough retrospective was exhibited at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid in the year 2002.
Born in Paris on July 26, 1928, Elio Romano Ervitz (“Romano, because my father once attended the University of Rome and liked it”) was the progeny of a Russian Orthodox Jew (his family included numerous Talmudic scholars) and his Russian spouse. They escaped to France after the Revolution of 1917.
Elliott Erwitt revealed in an autobiographical essay included in his 1988 book “Personal Exposures” that his father, Boris, had maintained his conviction in socialism and attributed the couple’s departure from “the Promised Land of the Soviet Paradise” to his wife, Eugenia (Trepel) Erwitt, whom he recalled as “embarrassingly wealthy when I was a child.”
His father, having relocated the family to Italy, deemed Mussolini’s administration intolerable in 1938 and returned the entire family to France. A year after Boris and Eugenia had divorced in Milan when their son was four years old, the three embarked on a voyage to the United States together on a vessel just days before the outbreak of World War II.
In New York, Elio Ervitz assumed the name Elliott Erwitt, but he maintained his nomadic lifestyle. In 1941, following two years of cohabitation with his father, a salesman, on Central Park West in Manhattan, the father and son traveled cross-country to Los Angeles while supporting themselves through the sale of wristwatches in small communities.
His father departed once more a few years later, this time to New Orleans to sell his commodities, leaving his sixteen-year-old son to fend for himself. Following his ordination as a Buddhist cleric in Japan, Boris returned to Manhattan to practice his adopted faith.
Elliott Erwitt became a photographer, according to Mr. Erwitt, who attributed his success to his “shyness” upon his arrival in New York, where he spoke no English. At the age of sixteen, he began taking photographs earnestly in Los Angeles using an antique glass-plate camera before upgrading to a Rolleiflex.
“My first client was my dentist,” he wrote. “Thereafter, it was people’s homes and children, and finally the senior prom.” Movie star photographs also sold well.
Following his graduation from Hollywood High School, he attended Los Angeles City College to study photography, then worked as a hustler in a commercial dark room. He returned to New York in 1949, where he encountered Capa and Steichen, attended the New School for Social Research to study film, and established a promising professional trajectory before his enlistment by the Army during the Korean War.
In 1951, while stationed in France with an Army Signal Corps detachment, he captured an image of soldiers lounging in the barracks. According to him, the photograph fundamentally altered his existence.
Elliott Erwitt was awarded a prize for his submission to a Life magazine contest, and the resulting photograph was titled “Bed and Boredom.” Mr. Erwitt acquired a vehicle with the $2,500 check, considered a substantial sum at the time. He christened the vehicle “Thank you, Henry,” after the publisher of Time-Life, Henry Luce.
Character motifs that Mr. Erwitt had already established were the unconventional and the unheralded. He produced a canine-themed illustration for a fashion editorial featuring women’s footwear in The New York Times Magazine in 1946.
Numerous exhibitions featured an image from that assignment depicting a panting Chihuahua in a cardigan alongside a woman in sandals on a sidewalk.
The reason he chose to photograph from a dog’s perspective was that canines see more footwear than any other animal.
Mr. Erwitt utilized a view camera predominantly for advertising assignments, reserving his 35-millimeter for personal use. Many, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, were astounded by the ease with which his friend could perform both types of work.
Mr. Cartier-Bresson once remarked, “In my opinion, Elliott has accomplished a miracle by working on a chain gang of commercial campaigns while offering a bouquet of stolen photographs with a distinct flavor and a smile from his deeper self.”
Mr. Erwitt, whose proficiency in four languages enabled him to secure consistent employment in Europe throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, delighted in his independent work.
“While certain individuals may find instability intolerable, I have never found it particularly bothersome,” he wrote in 1988, adding that his inconsistent income placed a greater strain on his girlfriends and spouses than it did on him.
Mr. Erwitt was previously married and divorced four times: from 1953 to 1960, to Lucienne Van Kan; from 1967 to 1974, to Diana Dann; from 1977 to 1984, to Susan Ringo; and from 1998 to 2012, to Pia Frankenberg.
Elliott Erwitt is further survived by Amelia Erwitt, another daughter from his third marriage, in addition to Sasha; Ellen and Jennifer Erwitt, two daughters from his first marriage; Misha and David, two sons from his first marriage; ten grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. His approximate sixty years of residence were spent on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
During the 1970s, Mr. Erwitt was one of the early investors to capitalize on the art market’s fascination with contemporary photographs. Brokers purchased large quantities of prints to utilize tax shelters. “That windfall paid for my East Hampton home,” he explained.
1972 saw the publication of “Photographs and Anti-Photographs,” the first in a series of books by Erwitt. He also produced and directed several short documentary films during this period, including “The Magnificent Marching 100” (1980), “The Many Faces of Dustin Hoffman” (1968), “Beauty Knows No Pain” (1971), “Red, White and Bluegrass” (1973), and “The Glassmakers of Herat, Afghanistan” (1977). Throughout the 1980s, he produced a collection of eighteen short comedies for HBO.
However, his humorous and dexterous still photography is his most enduring legacy. Nudity amused him just as much as canines did, and he discovered equal amounts of material on public beaches and in the streets. The human comedy stimulated his vision, although he encountered difficulty in articulating the mechanism by which it occurred.
“Even in the most idyllic of circumstances, a photograph will be lifeless; nothing will emerge,” he noted. “At that point, even a photograph of nothing, such as an individual scratching their nose, can yield a remarkable result.”
Despite the lighthearted nature of his illustrations, he maintained an obstinately anti-intellectual stance regarding his actions.
He approached interpretation with caution. He wrote, “In general, I don’t think too much.” “I certainly do not use those humorous terms that art critics and museum visitors find amusing.”
Elliott Erwitt held the view that photography was a “vocation for the lazy” that solely demanded “modest ability.” Even he was unable to shed light on the enigma surrounding his actions, and this appeared to be to his satisfaction. “Ideas, as delightfully entertaining as they may be in conversation and seduction, have little to do with photography,” he concluded.
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