EIt wasn’t that long ago that you could meet Elliott Erwitt at exhibitions and trade fairs, for example at Paris Photo, where he was interested in the latest works of his younger colleagues in the booths of international galleries, as he said – but strictly all his colleagues were younger than him. But you couldn’t really tell because of how briskly he pushed his walker through the hallways. If someone was in the way, he would boldly press a horn so hard that people would jump to the side in fright. Then they had to laugh. And in the past, Elliott Erwitt would have taken a picture at that exact moment. But he stopped taking photographs. Snapshot photography requires not only instinct but also speed. And he lost it in his early nineties.
Elliott Erwitt is the photographer who made the snapshot a genre. Time and again he recorded in a split second what the quirks of life were, looked for the human and the all-too-human and was not afraid to push his jokes to the limit of being silly. A horse appears to be smiling at the men trying to repair an old truck. Due to the chosen perspective, a bulldog replaces the head of the person on whose lap it is sitting. Or there are two small pumpkins on a shelf exactly at chest height of the old woman behind her. Erwitt called such motifs not snapshots, but grave shots. These are moments that make it difficult for the viewer to take the world too seriously.
#photographer #Elliott #Erwitt #died