Essays
How Elliott Erwitt Found His Signature Humor and Joy
Erwitt taught himself photography as a teenager. His most famous work was defined by wit, exuberance, and irrepressible curiosity.
In fall 2016, Aperture and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin copublished Elliott Erwitt: Home Around the World, a visual account of the photographer’s sixty-year career, from his early experiments in California to his intimate family portraits in New York and his celebrity and political magazine assignments around the world. Erwitt, who died on November 29, 2023, was renowned for his personal and humorous observations of the street and his irrepressible sense of curiosity. Here, we revisit an excerpt from Stuart Alexander’s essay for Home Around the World, in which the curator considers Erwitt’s early years and influences, his contributions to Life and Harper’s Bazaar, and his friendship with Robert Frank. —The Editors, 2023
Elliott Erwitt is a much lauded and supremely accomplished photographer known for his drily perceptive and witty pictures. But when he first picked up a camera, at the age of fifteen, he was a shy and earnest young man struggling to confront and observe the world with emotion and humility. Nevertheless, his early work, though tentative, contains the seeds of all of his subsequent photographs. This essay traces the development of Erwitt’s rich and varied personal vision from the mid-1940s to 1957, when he reached the level of artistic maturity that continues to distinguish his photographs today.
Much like any self-taught teenage photographer, Erwitt began with subjects that were close at hand: friends, family, still lifes, and even the contents of his bedroom. As he rapidly mastered the medium he experimented broadly, at times even combining multiple negatives. He just as quickly rejected such gimmicky techniques as foreign to his way of seeing. Erwitt was curious about the world and he sought to record it as simply and directly as he could. As a child he had lived in three countries; he was a native speaker of Italian and by the age of eleven had learned English, Russian, and some French. Shuttled back and forth between his separated parents he became remarkably independent. The circumstances of Erwitt’s upbringing encouraged adaptability above all, both personally and professionally. He learned to compartmentalize his life, emotions, and actions, and this helped him as he matured. It was his capacity to devote intense concentration simultaneously to disparate demands that made it easier for him than it was for many of his colleagues to make photographs for himself at the same time that he was making work “for hire.”
In early 1948, at the age of nineteen, he had the opportunity to present an exhibition of forty-two of his prints at the Arts and Crafts Club of New Orleans. Installation views from this showing allow us an opportunity to assess this stage in his development. The prints were all approximately square-format and hung on the walls salon style. The majority of the pictures he exhibited were accomplished geometric compositions without people in them. In one example, a window and its frame take up the upper left quarter of the image. In a pleasing play of light and shadow, sunlight reflects off the frame and the window and creates a triangular shape below. Meanwhile, a photograph of a wall in Erwitt’s Fountain Avenue, Los Angeles, house is a radical inversion of pictorial norms. The work’s central focus is an empty wall, and the traditional elements of an interior—a window, a painting, a lamp, and a bed—are truncated at the edges of the frame. In another picture we see a still life featuring a couple of soiled plates, knives, and a spoon; it is at once an arrangement of forms in a square frame and a portrayal of an adolescent’s scrappy lifestyle. Most of the photographs from that show that do include people have only a single figure, often seen from behind or at an oblique angle, as in Erwitt’s picture of a sunbather in her ruffled swimsuit. There was also a single, frontal self-portrait of the photographer wearing a striped shirt and sitting on a bed with bare, crossed legs, his gaze fixed impassively on the camera. In a dramatic portrait of his friend Bert Meyers, in contrast, we see a man in front of a blurred window. His head is tilted back, and the raking light across his face is all that is visible in the lower half of the frame.
The artist who made these works was a beginner, still figuring out how to manipulate the medium and compose a picture. The viewpoint is relatively cool and dispassionate. It is lacking in the emotional content that Erwitt has since deemed vital. In these straightforward and natural photographs his mastery of a variety of lighting situations is evident, but this is clearly the work of a shy young man who did not yet feel comfortable photographing people. The camera that he used to create his early pictures, a square-format twin-lens Rolleiflex, was adapted to his disposition at the time. He had to look down into the lens at waist level to see and photograph what was in front of him, and this enabled him to approach people unobtrusively. As the contact sheet with his famous picture of a chihuahua at a woman’s feet shows, the camera could also be set on the ground to capture a worm’s-eye view.
Later in 1948 Erwitt moved to New York. There he continued to take whatever small photography jobs he could find, mostly making portraits of authors. In March 1949 he got the chance to return to Europe for the first time since moving to America with his parents as a child. With his girlfriend, Jacqueline (Jackie) Segall, Erwitt was waiting to board the SS Rouen, a Liberty ship bound for Le Havre, France, when he met the Swiss photographer Robert Frank and his sixteen-year-old-girlfriend, Mary Lockspeiser, whom Frank would later marry. There was only room for six passengers, and Mary unsuccessfully attempted to stow away on the ship. Erwitt told her that it was not a good idea. She ended up waving goodbye from the pier. Frank was returning to Europe after two years in New York (and a three-month sojourn in South America). He had been employed by Harper’s Bazaar and was weary of the world of fashion photography. He had exchanged his apartment in New York for a flat in the 14th arrondissement that belonged to the Chinese painter Sanyu. Sharing so many days at sea and with so few people aboard, it was inevitable that Frank and Erwitt would get to know one another. To pass the time, Frank took to photographing life on the ship. At one point he handed over his Leica and asked Erwitt to photograph him sitting on a railing. Thus began a close relationship that would last for several years.
Four years older than Erwitt, Frank turned out to be a good friend and travel companion. He introduced Erwitt to photographers and other contacts and invited him to stay at Sanyu’s apartment, which was not far from the studios of Alberto Giacometti, Henri Matisse, and several other prominent artists. Once they arrived in Europe, Frank went to Switzerland to visit his family. Later in the year, Jackie left Erwitt on his own. When Frank returned to Paris he and Erwitt shared Sanyu’s apartment, and that fall they traveled together to the south of France and to Italy. During this trip Erwitt photographed side-by-side with Frank, and the two even swapped cameras from time to time for the occasional portrait. This allowed Erwitt to observe the differences between his square-format Rolleiflex and Frank’s smaller 35 mm rangefinder Leica, which had an elongated, rectangular format. Shooting with the Leica involved the more aggressive act of holding the camera directly to the eye, which meant that more speed, ruse, or resolve was required in order to photograph people with finesse. Its size also made it easier to manipulate while shooting, and its smaller negatives produced grainier, less sharp images, an effect that further heightened the resulting pictures’ sense of immediacy. Erwitt resolved to acquire a Leica as soon as he could afford one. The more he worked in the streets of Italy, the more he began to overcome his inhibitions about pointing a camera at strangers. Perhaps because he had himself been a child there, he became particularly interested in photographing the beauty and dignity of poor and working-class children in the gritty style of neorealist films—their faces filling the frame of his images.
At some point Erwitt’s father, Boris, had joined him in Europe, and together they returned to New York on the SS Nieuw Amsterdam, arriving on October 19, 1949. With the new perspective brought by his travels Erwitt decided he wanted to live in New York “forever,” and began looking for work. He stayed at Frank’s Eleventh Street apartment, frequently using it as a location for shooting the author portraits he was still producing regularly for the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, among others. When Frank returned from Europe in March 1950, Mary moved in. Erwitt shared the apartment with them when he was in town. Around this time he created six identical copies of a modest, spiral-bound book of thirty of the best 2 ¼-inch-square photographs he had made with his Rolleiflex. The book is a compendium of the variety of styles he had explored from 1946 to 1949 and includes pictures from Los Angeles, New York, France, and Italy. It is more a collection of pictures than a sequence. It is clear that some of the photographs were carefully paired on facing pages, but others do not appear to have any direct relationship.
A comparison of the photographs in the book and those in Erwitt’s exhibition in New Orleans nearly two years earlier is telling. Only two images appear in both venues: his photograph of the train window, now formally titled Train Window on a typed list taped into the book, and the still untitled photograph taken at Fountain Avenue noted above. Overall, the more recent works in the book show an increasing sophistication. His interest in motion and cinema is demonstrated in the pairing of a nearly abstract detail of a carousel, frozen in one frame and blurred with rapid movement in the next. At least half of the photographs include people. Unlike his earlier work, the pictures engage their subjects more directly. There are several photographs of children looking straight into the camera. The book ends with a picture of a boy struggling to peer up toward the camera, the bottom half of his face cut off at the lower edge. Erwitt is not that boy, but here, as in other works, he has found in the face of his subject emotions that he himself feels, seizing them on film to create a kind of self-portrait. This is one of the first examples of a theme that recurs over the next several years. Erwitt gave one copy of the book to Edward Steichen, director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), who had acquired at least three of his prints for MoMA’s collection.
It was not long before Erwitt was able to buy himself a Leica and increase his use of a rectangular format; he was soon using his square-format Rolleiflex almost exclusively for commercial jobs. The Leica better suited the needs of his personal work, and he was becoming less hesitant about openly pointing a camera at his subjects. A trip through the South offered him one of the first opportunities to try out his new 35 mm camera. Erwitt would later write: “I have a strong attraction to the American South. People there have this marvelous exterior—wonderful manners, warm friendliness— until you touch on things you’re not supposed to touch on. Then you see the hardness beneath the mask of nice manners.” There he documented visible signs of racism, which he found abhorrent. Swiftly and unobtrusively, he photographed an African American man bending down to drink from a crude fountain marked “Colored” while looking toward a refrigerated fountain marked “White”. Less blunt is his photograph of two beat-up cars—one black, and in the roughest condition; the other white—parked side-by-side behind a building that bears a sign for Dixie Beer.
Erwitt was curious about the world and he sought to record it as simply and directly as he could.
Erwitt’s life remained peripatetic throughout 1950. Back in the stimulating milieu of postwar New York, Frank invited Erwitt to the studio/darkroom that he shared with Louis Faurer for occasional jobs he did for Harper’s Bazaar. Faurer was a little older than both photographers and was an inspiration to them. He had a successful career as a fashion photographer while producing tender street portraits of nighttime denizens of Times Square. Erwitt’s photographs of beggars and marginal figures, particularly those around Times Square, share an affinity with Faurer’s personal work. But this fertile period in New York could not last forever. The Korean War had started and Erwitt knew that he would eventually be drafted into the Army. He had been using a variety of addresses—from Los Angeles to New Orleans to New York—conscious that every change of address delayed the draft process. When Roy Stryker, the legendary former director of the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration, invited him to move to Pittsburgh that fall and join a new project to record life in the city during a time of profound change, Erwitt readily agreed. Just a few months earlier Stryker, who was then directing a documentary photography project for Standard Oil, had sensed the urgency of Erwitt’s need for work and impressed him by reaching into his own pocket and paying him an advance of $100 to do a small job at a refinery in Bayway, New Jersey.
In Pittsburgh, Erwitt stayed in suitably transient quarters at the YMCA from September until the draft finally caught up with him in December 1950. The time he spent with Stryker in the meantime was transformative. In July of that year the Allegheny Conference on Community Development had hired Stryker to direct the Pittsburgh Photographic Library. The idea was to create photographs for exhibitions and the press about the city’s evolution as it emerged from its notoriously polluted industrial past to become a cleaner, more modern metropolis suitable for future development. Erwitt was part of a small army of photographers Stryker gathered to document the destruction of entire neighborhoods and their replacement by parks and sleek new buildings. The assignment offered him an unprecedented opportunity to work freely alongside such seasoned professionals as Harold Corsini, Esther Bubley, and Sol Libsohn. Stryker was known for giving his photographers “shooting scripts” with instructions on what to cover, but he gave the young photographer virtually free rein to shoot whatever he wanted. Erwitt shot dozens and dozens of rolls of film, both with his old Rolleiflex and his new Leica. He created rich and varied documentation in the Point area that was being razed, capturing everything from broad vistas of the river to shopfronts, kids in the street, signs and billboards, buses, parking lots, and the shadows of pedestrians.
During his time in Pittsburgh, Erwitt made photographs for himself that he knew would not be useful to the Photographic Library. This was a habit that he has continued during commercial jobs to this day. In one such sad boy “self- portrait” we see both a boy looking out the side window of a car through the reflection of nighttime city lights and Erwitt’s own reflection mirrored in the window as well. He often found himself surrounded by curious kids in the neighborhoods where he was photographing. One of Erwitt’s most often reproduced pictures is of another young boy in Pittsburgh with a toy gun pointed at his head. It is a disturbing image and one that is open to interpretation; this may explain its popularity and longevity. By looking at Erwitt’s contact sheet, we can see that he spent some time with the boy. He made ten exposures and he selected the second one, in which the boy’s smile is the most extreme. This combination of contradictory elements is one of the hallmarks of Erwitt’s photography. This image later prompted him to remark: “Contradictions are perfect for photographs; they make them interesting.”
Another photograph made around this time in New York depicts a brick wall affixed with two peeling posters. One is for the World Featherweight Championship boxing match held on September 8, 1950, at Yankee Stadium between great rivals Sandy Saddler and Willie Pep. Before thirty-nine thousand spectators, Saddler, who was African American, beat Pep, who was Caucasian. The other is Paul Rand’s poster for Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s No Way Out, a film noir in which a character played by Sidney Poitier gets caught up in a story of racial hatred after becoming the first African American doctor at the hospital where he was trained. Whether Erwitt saw the posters’ racial subtext or simply liked the bleakness of the wall emblazoned with the words “No Way Out” is impossible to say. Perhaps the image is in fact another “self-portrait,” this time commenting on the fact that his number was up and he could no longer avoid being drafted by the Army.
The unfettered experience in Pittsburgh was a terrific boost for Erwitt’s creative development, but his stay was cut short. His induction into the Army brought him back to New York at the beginning of 1951. After having his physical exam he checked in with Steichen, who was a retired Navy captain. Steichen, known for his ability to spot and nurture nascent talent, reached out to an official at the Pentagon, urging him to find Erwitt a post that would make use of his photographic skills. Steichen wrote: “He has imagination and originality. He is enthusiastic about photography and just beginning to make a name for himself. The Museum [of Modern Art] has acquired some of his photographs for its permanent collection. His name is Elliott Erwitt and he is just twenty-two years old. I hope you find somebody with the authority and the wisdom to get this boy into photography.” While waiting to depart for basic training in New Jersey, Erwitt stayed briefly at Eleventh Street with Mary and Robert Frank, who had married in 1950.
After his experience in Pittsburgh, Erwitt was sensitive to the nuances of daily routines and adept at capturing life’s curious moments. His documentation of the tedium of basic training, which he titled Bed and Boredom, won him second prize in the “Story Division” of the Life Young Photographers Contest in November 1951, the only time the leading magazine ever sponsored such a contest. Erwitt’s were among the winning photographs in various categories that were featured on the front cover and more than thirty-two pages in the magazine. Other honorees included Frank, Esther Bubley, Ruth Orkin, Louis Stettner, and Dennis Stock. Among the seven jurors (including the managing editor of Life, Edward K. Thompson) were Steichen and Stryker. The pictures Erwitt submitted are straightforward photojournalistic images of soldiers at rest on their bunks, hanging up laundry, or waiting out the rain. Traditionally, photoessays on basic training concentrate on grueling physical activities, but since Erwitt had to participate in the same exertions, it was only possible for him to photograph the less vigorous periods, and this resulted in his novel approach. One of the jurors described his photographs as “[catching] an essential truth of Army life.” With the $1,500 prize, Erwitt, who was by that time stationed with the Signal Corps in Europe, bought a car he named “Thank you, Henry” as a nod to Henry Luce, the founder of the Time-Life empire.
All photographs from Elliott Erwitt: Home Around the World (Aperture, 2016). Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos
We do not know how much the fact that he was posted to Europe, rather than to the front in Korea, can be attributed to his language skills, or to the letter from Steichen, or to simple luck (as Erwitt claims), but he did have as near idyllic a time in the Army as possible, first posted to Karlsruhe, Germany, and finally to Orléans, France, not far from Paris. He made routine ID photos and the occasional portrait of an officer. Having his own car to travel around with on furlough and free weekends afforded him extraordinary mobility for someone of his rank. He began to shoot color film, often using two cameras, one loaded with color, the other with black and white. He also did a few commercial jobs. He made frequent trips to Paris, where he met Robert Capa at the Magnum office. Capa told him to check in when he got out of the Army. He also visited Robert and Mary Frank and their son, Pablo, after they moved to Paris.
Erwitt was a romantic young man. His photographs in Paris are attuned to life in the streets and record small but beautiful moments in the city. He engaged with people in the street and the market. And he did not limit himself to Paris. In the provincial town of Orléans, where he was based, he captured the raking light on the cobblestones as a bird takes flight. This photograph’s mood of mystery and promise had a broad appeal; it is one of the most frequently reproduced of his pictures from this period. Later in the summer of 1952, Erwitt drove his car down to visit the Franks, who by this time had moved to Valencia, Spain. He made an intimate picture of Robert and Mary Frank dancing in their kitchen at that time. During the trip he took his car on a boat with them to Mallorca, where he and Frank photographed the seemingly primitive village lifestyle. In Barcelona, still seeing outsiders wherever he went, he caught another sad looking boy hitching a ride on the outside of a tram while a couple looks out from behind the glass. It was also during this time that he fell in love with the woman who would become his first wife, Lucienne van Kan. He made pictures of her and of benches in the parks they visited together in Paris and Italy. He had finally found someone he wanted to live and raise a family with.
This essay is excerpted from Elliott Erwitt: Home Around the World (Aperture, 2016).