Elliott Erwitt, a photographer whose numerous pictures of celebrities, dogs, politicians, and more have woven their way into public consciousness, has died at 95.
The Magnum photography collective, of which he was a part, announced his passing on Thursday. The Magnum announcement said that Erwitt died at his home, surrounded by his family. It did not specify a cause of death.
Marilyn Monroe vamping in a hotel room, Jackie Kennedy mourning a slain John F. Kennedy, a couple caught kissing in the side view mirror of a car, Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev engage in tense conversation: these are among the countless subjects that Erwitt captured with a nearly unparalleled wit. They have appeared in books and as posters and postcards, and have been seen widely in art institutions across the globe.
Shooting in sumptuous black and white, Erwitt was among those who defined documentary photography during the postwar era. Working both on commission for publications and for his own purposes, he managed to make well-known subjects seem new, mysterious, and seductive.
But for a photographer whose work is so esteemed, Erwitt was often modest about his achievements and his methods. He spoke in short, clipped statements that belied just how refined his compositions were.
What were his main interests? Dogs and people, he once told the Guardian. How did he work so prolifically? By having a camera on him at all times and using a fast shutter speed, he repeatedly explained.
Erwitt stated that his artistic guide was Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French photographer whose modernist shots emphasized rigorous compositions discovered on the fly. Erwitt, too, discovered the way his pictures would look as he went, remaining open to chance.
One of his Marilyn Monroe photographs, for example, was taken while she was working on the film Some Like It Hot. Rather than telling her how to pose, as some photographers might, Erwitt observed her. “I like the atmosphere, and the fact that it’s a famous person being photographed in an ordinary way,” he said.
One of Elliott Erwitt’s photographs of Marilyn Monroe, on view at the F11 Photographic Museum in China.
Photo Edward Wong/South China Morning Post via Getty Images
Elliott Erwitt was born in Paris in 1928 to Russian parents, though he would move to the US before he was even a teenager, in 1939. He would take up photography in the decade afterward, and then go on to study the medium, along with filmmaking, in college. He graduated in 1950, only to be drafted into the US Army the year after.
Unlike some of his colleagues, Erwitt was sent not to Korea, where the US was involved in war, but to Verdun, France, where he was stationed at the PX. There he met his first wife, Lucienne Van Kan, whom he would marry in 1953 and divorce in 1960. (He had three more wives: Diana Dann, Susan Ringo, and Pia Frankenberg; he was unmarried at the time of his death.)
Before being drafted, Erwitt had already linked up with some pillars of postwar photography, including Robert Capa and Roy Stryker, whom Erwitt credited with having given him his first big break. By the time Erwitt was discharged in 1953, those connections had come in handy. That same year, Capa founded Magnum, and Erwitt was invited to join.
Installation view of an Elliott Erwitt exhibition at the F11 Photographic Museum in China.
Edward Wong/South China Morning Post via Getty Images
Erwitt would go on to photograph for some of the most preeminent publications of the moment, including Look and Life, which were prized for their photojournalistic offerings. And in the decades afterward, Erwitt’s assignments took him far and wide, from Cuba to Argentina, from Las Vegas to Birmingham, England.
Certain of his pictures have become so widely available that many may not even know that Erwitt shot them: a photo of a man with an umbrella leaping before the Eiffel Tower, for example, or a shot of a woman seated on a New York stoop who is posed so that her head is replaced by her snaggle-toothed dog’s.
Canine companions were a constant in Erwitt’s photography. He shot them leaping, lounging in the trunks of cars, contemplating crashing waves on beaches, and gazing upward adoringly at their owners. He produced several photobooks deovted specifically to dogs, some of which were his own.
Last year, the photography blog PetaPixel asked him why he was so interested in dogs. Erwitt’s response: “Because they don’t ask for photos.”