The early life of Elliott Erwitt, who has died aged 95, was marked by upheaval and conflict. His Russian Jewish parents had fled their home country after the Russian Revolution to France, where he was born in 1928. The family then headed to Milan, only to return to Paris to escape Mussolini’s regime. They eventually migrated to the US, just as the second world war began. Erwitt was drafted for military service in 1951, and served in Germany and France.
Photography, at first, provided young Erwitt the opportunity to retreat from the world. One of his first interactions with the medium as a teenager was printing headshots of actors in a commercial darkroom in Los Angeles. Later, he would photograph Hollywood’s most famous stars himself, including Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich and Grace Kelly.
Erwitt joined Magnum Photos in 1953 and served as the agency’s president during the late 1960s. He took many of the pictures that would define his time. Among his most famous was the snapshot taken during the “kitchen debate” in 1959. Erwitt caught US vice-president Richard Nixon jabbing the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in the chest with an authoritarian finger – a moment of political slapstick that became a symbol of Nixon’s leadership and American autonomy. The image was used in Nixon’s 1960 presidential campaign. “I just happened to be in the right spot at the right time,” Erwitt humbly recalled.
Yet Erwitt was also searching, perhaps subconsciously, for a sense of stability, something that would speak beyond his time. Much of the pleasure of looking at Erwitt’s pictures today derives from a sense of his relentless curiosity dovetailed with an unbridled delight in humanity.
Erwitt was drawn to the perennial, the universal and the soul-affirming – a laughing child standing on his head will always be amusing. A solitary, impeccably dressed older gentleman sitting in a park, head tilted back to bask in the sun, will always embody grace and wistfulness. The haptic intimacy of lovers dancing in a kitchen – the man standing on his partner’s feet in battered espadrilles – elicits joy no matter where the kitchen is, or who the people are, or when it took place. Erwitt was equal parts eyewitness and dreamer, as the International Centre of Photography in New York put it when presenting him with a lifetime achievement award in 2011.
Erwitt downplayed his role as a photographer, often shrugging off pretension or chalking it up to happenstance: “It is silly stuff that I think has some relevance with nothing really important happening, but somehow being able to communicate some kind of fun,” he once said. There’s a lightness of touch that characterises even his most serious images, and he was a master of ironic juxtapositions and comic charm: in the 1980s, he even produced 18 comedy films for HBO. One of his cheekiest images shows a man’s naked buttocks in the foreground, close to the camera: the focus falls on the smiling faces of two elderly onlookers who look up at their nude interlocutor. It’s the perfect Erwittian moment.
However casual he was about it, Erwitt’s irresistible ease was the hard-won fruit of decades of devotion to life as it unfolded in front of his camera. Only one attentive to looking and attuned to human emotions could make the images he did. Erwitt moved with the times but stayed true to his own unchanging vision of the world. His legacy is one of hope, laughter and optimism – and it conquers us all, in spite of ourselves.
