Without approaching the sarcasm of Martin Parr and his popular scenes of mass tourism, the American photographer Elliot Erwitt captured in his works everyday humor and absurdity with irony, but also emotions and love, whether they were constant or fleeting, as a legacy of the best black -Weiß school, whose roots go back to Herbert List and which crowned an entire generation in the eighties (Irving Penn, Helmut Newton, Richard Avedon, Erwitt himself), he defined the way of capturing a world in motion, as his pictures seem to do partially fly. Erwitt excelled in portraying children and dogs, particularly restless beings and creatures that, as Hitchcock recommended at the time – and Bertolucci later reiterated – were best kept away from the camera.
“The beauty of photography is its ability to stop time,” he said. His time ended this Wednesday at the age of 95 in his home in Manhattan, surrounded by his family. His death was announced by the Magnum agency, which he was a member of for more than six decades and which he headed in the 1960s. A renowned photojournalist, but also an advertising photographer, also said something that perfectly describes his work: “For a photo to be good, it must have balance, shape and background.” But to be very good, it must also have an indefinable magic. Almost all of his snapshots have the impression of transience. Because Elliot Erwitt perfected what his teacher Henri Cartier-Bresson believed was the key to a good photograph: the “decisive moment”, the right moment, even without ever knowing that the result would live up to expectations. The finger on the shutter button ready to notice the extraordinary in the ordinary and capture that millisecond forever.
Erwitt was a staunch advocate of black and white film well into the era of digital photography, always armed with his Rolleiflex and his Leica. He combined a dual career as a journalist and an artist. He began working in the 1950s with Magnum, the photojournalism agency founded by Cartier-Bresson and another mentor, Robert Capa, as well as with popular magazines of the time such as Life, Newsweek, Collier’s and Look. The country, fresh from the war and addicted to optimism until the American Way of Life was patented, exceeded its commercial goal, which allowed it to live and pay its bills. But he always brought a different camera to the sessions, the artist’s. He called his first job “creative obedience,” a task he performed with skill to develop his artistic drive. This duality played out until his involvement as a photographer allowed him to choose to create and not just recreate what he saw.
“Elliott achieved a miracle,” Cartier-Bresson told The Guardian in 2003, “through his work.” [a la vez] in commercial campaigns and offering a bouquet of stolen photos [de esas mismas sesiones] with a special touch, a smile from deep within you.”
Elliot Erwitt in the Nevada desert, 1960. Ernst Haas (Getty Images)
Although he was fascinated by dogs, he was also the author of a wonderful portrait of a woman with a cat (Lucienne and Cat, 1953). However, he portrayed them in unusual settings and often displaced the moods of people: perplexed, curious, melancholic, argumentative, impudent dogs. One of them walks along the beach at Deauville in the off-season as an allegory of loneliness; another casually looks at the photographer from the driver’s seat of a Renault on a Paris street. Because Erwitt was one of the greats of American photography, but also immortalized the Paris of clichés: the French boy in a beret, on a bicycle, between his father and two baguettes. Or the graceful pirouette of a man with an umbrella silhouetted against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower as a couple kisses. Kisses, like children and dogs, were constant motifs in his work. He dedicated three monographic books to dogs: “Son of Bitch,” “To the Dogs,” and “Woof,” the English onomatopoeia for barking.
The artist who consecrated the charisma of Castro and Che
To call Elliot Erwitt a photojournalist with a dual artistic life would be to limit the magnitude of his work. Frank Sinatra, Muhammad Ali and Simone de Beauvoir paraded in front of his camera. His 1964 portraits of Cuban leader Fidel Castro and icon Che Guevara strutting through the streets of Havana definitively celebrated the charisma of both. “Fidel Castro was very photogenic, a kind of cowboy,” he later said. “Of course an interesting person and very talkative. It was extraordinary to have them together in the same room. They were willing to be photographed, it was easy. It’s much easier to photograph the stars than not to photograph them.”
He also showed the lesser-known side of other, more worldly stars. Marilyn Monroe was taken off the Hollywood pedestal to simply show her as a diligent student of a screenplay; to Jacqueline Kennedy, who stood loudly alone in the crowd after her husband’s funeral, folding the flag covering the coffin in her hands. Erwitt was the official White House photographer during the presidency of the Democrat who was assassinated in Dallas 60 years ago.
Although he traveled halfway around the world, including Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, Erwitt’s creative universe began and ended at home. One of his most famous photos, a grainy chiaroscuro from 1953, shows his wife Lucienne staring delightedly at Ellen, their six-day-old baby, sleeping in bed while a cat watches over the child’s feet (a variation of the above). Lucienne and cat). The author himself defined it simply as “a family photo of my first son, my first wife and my cat,” but it became one of the bestsellers of his career, so much so that “several of my children had access to it at school.” University,” he explained in an interview. This Wednesday, his daughter Shasha was responsible for announcing that her father had stopped time for good, something he had followed on camera his entire life.
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