The American photographer Elliott Erwittgreat master of Black and white shots who depict ironic and absurd everyday situations, died on Wednesday, November 29th, at the age of 95 at his home in Manhattan. The announcement of his death was made today New York TimesHe writes: “Photographers with a comic vision of life rarely win the recognition given to nature lovers or chroniclers of war and misery.” Elliott Erwitt was an exception.”
Erwitt for over sixty years used his camera to tell “visual jokes.”He found material wherever he went. “His keen sense of silly, sometimes insightful conjunctions – a dog lying on its back in a cemetery, a glowing Coca-Cola machine in Alabama at a missile parade, a mangy potted plant in a kitschy Miami Beach ballroom – brought him constant Commissions earned the affection of an audience that shared his sweet, Chaplin-like sense of the absurd,” writes The New York Times.
Elliot Erwitt was born in Paris on July 26, 1928 to Russian parents and moved to the United States after spending his childhood there Milan and in Paris. As a student at the New School for Social Research in New York, he began his career as an assistant in the 1950s Roy Stryker and later, when he came into contact with Edward Steichen and Robert Capa, he became 1953 independent photographerHe worked for magazines such as “Collier’s”, “Look”, “Life” and “Holiday” and for companies such as Air France and KLM. In 1954 he became a full memberMagnum Photos Agencywhich gave him a lot of visibility and allowed him to carry out photography projects all over the world.
Strongly influenced by the lesson of Eugene Atget and at the same time so attracted to irony Robert Doisneau Erwitt tried to transfigure reality with the formalism of Henri Cartier Bresson or to reinterpret it through the disillusioned gaze of photography. With the reportage books “Photographies and Anti-Photographies” (1972) and “Son of a Bitch” (1974) he reached “Personal Exposures” (1988) and the more recent “To the dogs” (1992) and Between the Genders” ( 1994), both in the sequences shot on the street and in the images dedicated to his favorite animal, the dog, Erwitt uses chance, the accidental and bizarre event as a metaphor to reflect on human events with a mocking eye. At the beginning of the 1970s, Erwitt began to devote himself to cinema and made numerous documentaries, including “Beauty knows no pain(1971), “The glassmaker of Herat” (1977) and “Elliott Erwitt, by design” (1983). Major retrospectives of his work have been organized in the United States and Europe.