The American photographer Elliott Erwittgreat master of black and white shots which portray ironic and absurd everyday situations, died at the age of 95 on Wednesday 29 November in his home in Manhattan. The announcement of his passing was made today by New York Times, writing: “Photographers with a comic vision of life rarely win the acclaim accorded to nature exalters or chroniclers of war and squalor. Elliott Erwitt was an exception.”
For over sixty years Erwitt used his camera to tell “visual jokes”, finding material wherever he walked. “His keen eye for silly, sometimes telling conjunctions – a dog lying on its back in a cemetery, a glowing Coca-Cola machine in Alabama at a rocket parade, a mangy potted plant in a tacky ballroom Miami Beach – earned him constant commissions and the affection of an audience that shared his sweet, Chaplin-like sense of the absurd”, writes the “New York Times”.
Born in Paris on July 26, 1928 to parents of Russian origin, Elliot Erwitt moved to the United States after spending his childhood in Milano and in Paris. A student at the New School for Social Research in New York, he began his career in the 1950s as an assistant Roy Stryker and subsequently, coming into contact with Edward Steichen and Robert Capa, he became independent photographer in 1953, working for magazines such as “Collier’s”, “Look”, “Life” and “Holiday” or for companies such as Air France and KLM. In 1954 he became a full member ofMagnum Photos agencywhich gave him a lot of visibility and allowed him to undertake photographic projects all over the world.
Strongly influenced by the lesson of Eugene Atget and at the same time attracted so much by the irony of Robert Doisneau as much as from the formalism of Henri Cartier Bresson, Erwitt tried to transfigure reality or rather to reinterpret it through the disenchanted eye of photography. With the reportage books “Photographs and anti-photographs” (1972) and “Son of a Bitch” (1974), to arrive at “Personal exposures” (1988) and the more recent “To the dogs” (1992) and Between the sexes” (1994), both in the sequences shot on the street and in the images dedicated to his favorite animal, the dog, Erwitt uses coincidence, the fortuitous and bizarre event as a metaphor to reflect with a mocking eye on human events. At the beginning of the seventies Erwitt began to devote himself to cinema, making numerous documentaries including “Beauty knows no pain” (1971), “The glassmaker of Herat” (1977) and “Elliott Erwitt, by design” (1983). Important retrospectives dedicated to his work have been organized in the United States and Europe.
2023-11-30 21:21:17
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