Elliott Erwitt’s photographs make you smile, and what a gift that is. A particular classic is the little dog, smiling slyly under a knit hat, and standing next to what looks like the booted legs of a human being, and two legs of a taller dog on a street.
Rick Smolan, who himself is an accomplished photographer, and Elliott Erwitt’s son-in-law, told us, “He often carried a squeeze horn that would startle both dogs and their owners to get their attention. Sometimes, he would also bark.”
“I take a lot of pictures of dogs,” Elliott Erwitt once said, “because I like dogs, because they don’t object to being photographed, and they don’t ask for prints.”
There is an exhibit of Erwitt’s at the Staley-Wise Gallery in New York this summer. The exhibit coincides with the publication of Last Laughs, a new book of photographs selected by the Erwitt family just before Elliott died in 2023 at the age of 95.
Elliott Erwitt was born in the summer of 1928 to Russians who had fled the Bolsheviks, and came to Paris and Milan before fleeing the spread of antisemitism and Nazism. They landed in New York just as Germany invaded Poland.
“I was 11 years old, but I remember the journey,” Erwitt told Rick Smolan, who has done a foreword to Last Laughs. “The boat had to be blacked out. U-boats were everywhere sinking ships. It was one of the last boats to leave.”
His son-in-law notes, “Here began Erwitt’s life-long knack for timing.”
Elliott Erwitt went to work in a commercial darkroom in Hollywood as a teen, then worked as a janitor to pay for film classes at the New School for Social Research in New York. He joined the prestigious Magnum Photos in 1953, and became their president in the late 1960s – and never stopped finding photos with a signature streak of wit and warmth.
Look at the tenderness he captured in 1953: a pregnant woman napping, with a kitten curled up against her belly, to oversee her tranquility.
“The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words,” he once said.
In 1975, he captured the quiet comedy of visitors at the Chateau of Versailles who seemed less enthralled by the lavish paintings than whatever was written on a small card in a huge empty frame alongside an opulent portrait of an old noble, who gives them a sideways glance.
A photo to humble any artist – or old noble.
Erwitt also captured many famed faces of his time, from Marilyn Monroe to Che Guevara. But the heart of his work is his portraiture of people he encountered on the streets of the world.
“Elliott just found humor everywhere,” says Rick Smolan. “His pictures were never cruel, and he wasn’t making fun. He just thought humans were amusing.”
Who cannot smile back at this little boy in Bahia, Brazil in this 2005 photo, outdazzling the toothpaste ad behind him?
Elliott Erwitt was productive to the end, and lived long enough to see cameras on our phones used to snap everything from breaking news and multitudinous pictures of children and pets (I am so guilty) to ludicrous selfies. But Rick Smolan tells us, “As Elliott once said, buying a pen doesn’t make you a great writer any more than having a camera on your phone makes you a great photographer.”
The exhibit of Elliott Erwitt photographs runs through August 1, and the book Last Laughs is out now.
