Photographer Elliott Erwitt turned mundane into art

Work appeared in Life, Look; subjects ran spectrum from presidents to dogs

Elliott Erwitt, a renowned photojournalist and commercial photographer who captured mundane, sometimes fleeting scenes of life and transformed them into humorous, enthralling or disturbingly evocative moments for all time, died Nov. 29 at his home in Manhattan. He was 95.

The death was announced by Magnum Photos, where Erwitt had a more than six-decade affiliation, including three years as the agency’s president in the 1960s.

In a body of work spanning seven decades, Erwitt proved a master of what his mentor Henri Cartier-Bresson called seizing the “decisive moment” — being trigger-quick to observe the extraordinary in the ordinary and turn it into compelling art.

Erwitt, who remained a proponent of black-and-white film well into the age of digital photography, had dual careers as a journalist and an artist. He began contributing in the 1950s to Magnum, the photojournalism agency founded by Cartier-Bresson and another mentor, Robert Capa, as well as to popular magazines of the day, such as Life, Newsweek, Collier’s and Look.

On his photo shoots, Erwitt carried two cameras, one for his assignment and one for his pleasure. He insisted that his paid professional work — which he termed “creative obedience” — was merely a means to support his avocation. Among his acquired photographic enthusiasms was a fascination with dogs, which he showed in comically improbable settings. One is in the driver’s seat of a Renault, on a Paris street, glancing insouciantly toward the photographer.

“Elliott has to my mind achieved a miracle,” Cartier-Bresson told the Guardian newspaper in 2003, “working on a chain gang of commercial campaigns and still offering a bouquet of stolen photos with a flavor, a smile from his deeper self.”

Erwitt embraced his personal photography with unremitting passion. He wandered the streets of capital cities and distressed communities around the world, pausing to snap a few images of any scene that caught his instinctive eye: a small French boy in a beret sitting on a bicycle, between his father and two baguettes, grinning at the photographer; a young woman, her back to the camera, gazing at the Empire State Building as it emerges from the fog; an African American child smiling and holding a toy gun to his head in 1950 Pittsburgh.

“What draws us in is that you can go back to an Elliott Erwitt picture again and again and always find another layer,” said Mark Lubell, executive director of the International Center of Photography in New York. “What makes us connect is the humanity in those pictures.”

His journalism and commercial work led to encounters with celebrities including Frank Sinatra, Muhammad Ali and Simone de Beauvoir. Erwitt held out for the intimacy and immediacy he found in their less-guarded moments. A 1956 photo of Marilyn Monroe shows her not as a cartoonish sex goddess or doomed victim but as a thoughtful actress poring over a script with an enigmatic smile.

His 1964 portraits of Cuban leader Fidel Castro and fellow revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara swaggering through Havana’s streets highlighted their charisma.

“Fidel Castro was very photogenic, kind of a cowboy,” Erwitt later told the digital-media company 1854 Media. “An interesting person, obviously, and very chatty. It was extraordinary to get them in the same room. Che was at the time busy trying to get other countries to follow the Cuban example. They were quite willing to be photographed, it was quite easy. It’s a lot easier to photograph stars than not.”

Armed with his Rolleiflex 4x5 portrait camera, along with his versatile Leica Rangefinder, Erwitt bore witness to some of the mid- and late 20th century’s defining moments.

He took several notable pictures of pre-civil rights-era America, including one of a young Black man, in North Carolina, drinking from a dingy water fountain next to a sparkling fountain for whites.

In 1957, he was in the Soviet Union to photograph the launch of Sputnik and was the only Western photographer to capture the 40th anniversary of the Russian Revolution in Moscow. He was an accredited photographer in President John F. Kennedy’s White House, and he took a stark portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy at her husband’s funeral in 1963, her face an image of grief.

A few years earlier, he had photographed Vice President Richard M. Nixon jabbing his finger into the burly chest of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at a 1959 American industrial exhibition in Moscow. The encounter came to be known as the “Kitchen Debate,” and the next year — much to Erwitt’s chagrin — Nixon used the photo in his failed presidential campaign, to illustrate his tough stance on communism.

For all his travels, one of Erwitt’s most celebrated photos was taken at home: a grainy 1953 image, shot with little more than window light, of his wife, Lucienne, watching with adoration their sleeping 6-dayold baby, Ellen, on their bed.

The photo, which Erwitt saw as just “a family picture of my first child, my first wife and my cat,” was included in Edward Steichen’s best-selling “Family of Man” book in 1954 and the photography exhibition the next year at the Museum of Modern Art. Among Erwitt’s best-selling prints, it “put several of my kids through college,” he later told an interviewer. (He won the International Center of Photography’s lifetime achievement award, among other honors.)

Erwitt at times spoke critically about the pretension and artifice he observed in fashion and art photography. Known for his puckish sense of humor, he made his point by creating an alter ego, a self-important French photographer, André S. Solidor, whose initials make an intended pun. Under that name, he published a book with gratuitous nudity and pointless imagery (including a fish head smoking a cigar).

In his work, Erwitt often defied prevailing ideas in photography. He cared little about sharp focus, composition and the image-enhancing effects available in the darkroom. To the untrained eye, many of his photographs — flat, grainy, uncropped — may appear to be the products of hurried execution.

“There’s an incredible vitality to his pictures,” said Alison Nordstrom, a photography historian and curator. “Some of those flaws — being out of focus, chopping someone’s head off — really contribute to that sense of being alive and in the moment.”

Erwitt published his final book, “Found, Not Lost,” in 2021, at age 93.

Elio Romano Erwitz was born in Paris on July 26, 1928, to Russian-Jewish-immigrant parents. His father was an architect, and his mother came from a family of wealthy merchants in Moscow. They lived in Milan before fleeing Benito Mussolini’s antisemitic racial laws in 1938 and arrived in New York at the start of World War II. Elio was soon renamed Elliott Erwitt.

After his parents divorced in 1941, he moved to Los Angeles with his father, who by then was selling watches. Erwitt got his first camera while at Hollywood High School and wandered the neighborhood snapping photos during the war years.

When Elliot was 15, he later told the Financial Times, his father abandoned him. “I was on my own and had to fend for myself,” he said. But he professed not to harbor bitterness toward his father, whom he described as a “wonderful man” and who later ventured into photography. “He said he wanted ‘to follow in the footsteps of his son,’” Erwitt recalled.

While in high school, he earned money by photographing weddings. He studied photography formally at Los Angeles City College. In 1948, Erwitt moved back to New York and took photography and filmmaking classes at what is now the New School for Social Research.