The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Elliott Erwitt
Photographer whose sense of mischief expressed itself in his visual ‘one-liners’ and pictures of dogs
ELLIOTT ERWITT, who has died aged 95, was one of photography’s great humorists, best known for his pictures of dogs; he was also a photojournalist who documented Jackie Kennedy’s grief at her husband’s funeral and immortalised the “kitchen debate” between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev in 1959.
He was at the Moscow Fair on an unglamorous assignment to photograph an exhibition of Westinghouse fridges when Nixon, then vice-president, and Khrushchev walked into the display kitchen. The Russian leader began haranguing Nixon, arguing that it was better to have only one model of washing machine than many; Nixon made some disobliging remarks about living conditions in the Soviet Union, and jabbed Khrushchev with his finger.
Erwitt was shaking so hard with laughter that he almost could not press the shutter, because Nixon was shouting: “We eat meat while you eat cabbage!” and Khrushchev was shouting: “Go f--- my grandmother!” But the photograph made Nixon look commanding, and it was later used without permission in his 1960 presidential campaign – to the Democrat Erwitt’s irritation.
Such vagaries of chance ruled his life, and he refused to subscribe to any other theory of photography. “It’s a crap shoot,” he said. “It’s a gift when it happens. It’s nothing you can plan on, and it’s not conceptual, thank God.” Some of his best results came from drifting along in a crowd, then turning 180 degrees on his heel, and photographing the people behind him.
He made famous portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, but his more unusual gift was being able to elevate ordinary American life into something timeless by capturing the visual “one-liner” – nude artists sketching a fully clothed model, a dog navigating a thicket of human legs – in a way that did not feel contrived.
He poked fun at “museumese”, saying: “Photography is so simple that people feel inferior, so they have to invest it with fancy language and, to put it bluntly, bulls---.” He insisted that his own photographs were not about anything in particular, adding as a wind-up: “I think that makes them a little more universal.”
His dog photographs were hailed as a hilarious mirror of the human condition, and he did concede that when photographing dogs he was really photographing people – whether it was poodles with absurd cuts, or the feet of owner and dog side by side, or simply anthropomorphising an expressive canine face.
“Dogs make easy, uncomplaining targets without the self-conscious hang-ups and possible objections of humans caught on film,” he said. He would bark at dogs to razz them up. His own dog, a co-operative muse, had been trained to urinate on command, which helped Erwitt to compose a satirical shot of the Brandenburg Gate. “If I really took pictures of people doing some of these things, I’d get into trouble.”
He was born Elio Romano Ervitz in Paris on July 26 1928, to a Jewish father and a Russian aristocratic mother. He spent his first decade in Milan, then in 1939 they fled to New York. The renamed Elliott – who spoke no English – enrolled at a rough-andtumble school on the Upper West Side. In 1941 he moved west with his father, attending Hollywood High School, with odd jobs as a soda jerk, an usher and in a commercial darkroom.
The camera gave him the confidence of a mask: one of his first photographic commissions, when he was 15, came from his dentist, who posed by his drill.
In 1948, Erwitt returned to New York, where he met the Magnum photo agency co-founder Robert Capa, the photographer and curator Edward Steichen, and Roy Stryker, the man behind the Farm Security Administration’s project to make a photographic record of America in the Great Depression. In 1950 Stryker sent Erwitt to photograph an oil refinery in Pittsburgh, then kept his young protégé there all autumn, documenting race relations in the Steel City.
In 1951, Erwitt was drafted into the army, serving in the Signal Corps in Germany and France, and he took a series of wry photographs of military life called “Bed and Boredom”; one shot won him a $2,500 prize from Life magazine.
In 1953, Capa invited him to join Magnum, and by the late 1960s Erwitt had become its president, a post he left after three years, not without relief. He described the photo agency as “a combination of prima donnas”: “Sure, we’re a family,” he said. “That’s why we tear each other’s throats out.”
He was without vanity when it came to his bread-and-butter commercial work, which he kept up all his life to pay the alimony (he had six children from three marriages). On one fashion shoot, which involved a monkey, Erwitt found that the monkey was getting paid $100 more per day than he was. If a client wanted it, he would shoot in colour, but the photographs he took for himself were always black and white.
His favourite subjects were couples romancing, people on beaches, and museum-goers absorbed in art (he called it “shooting fish in a barrel”). He would hide the sound of the shutter by coughing, a trick he learnt from Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, when the assassin waits for a cymbal clash before shooting.
Fluent in four languages, Erwitt worked in Europe a great deal, but America suited him best, partly because Americans were less self-conscious. He liked photographing the Deep South, where he sensed an inner hardness masked by good manners. He also fell in love with Scotland, and published a book on it in 2018.
In the 1970s he turned to film, making documentaries and shorts.
When asked about reincarnation, he said he would come back as a labrador, “running around on the beach, chasing balls, swimming in the ocean. Sounds nice. The disadvantage would be that in 15 years or so, I’d have to look for another venue.”
Elliott Erwitt, born July 26 1928, died November 29 2023