Elliott Erwitt Snaps - Softcover

Flowers, Charles; Sayle, Murray

Softcover

ISBN 10: 071484330X ISBN 13: 9780714843308

Publisher: Phaidon Press, 2003

Synopsis

One of the leading photographers of his generation, Elliott Erwitt (b.1928) has been taking pictures since the late 1940s. A member of the prestigious Magnum agency since 1954, he has photographed all over the world and his images have been the subject of many books and exhibitions.

Containing over 500 pictures, over half of which have never been published before, Elliott Erwitt Snaps is a unique and comprehensive survey of his work. From famous images such as Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon arguing in Moscow in 1959 and Marilyn Monroe with the cast of the movie The Misfits, to his many more personal images of places, things, people and animals, Erwitt's unmistakable, often witty, style gives us a snapshot of the famous and the ordinary, the strange and the mundane over a period of more than half a century, through the lens of one of the period's finest image-makers.

The book is arranged in nine chapters, each with a one-word title: Look, Move, Play, Read, Rest, Touch, Tell, Point, Stand. For Erwitt, whose photography is a study and celebration of life, these are the basic actions of life - the things people do. The photographs are not intended to illustrate the words, but the words act as a means of grouping and organizing, making broad connections and also playing with pun and ambiguity, in keeping with the visual games Erwitt plays.

About this title

Review:

Elliott Erwitt may not be a name that rolls off the tongue, but many of the photographs featured in Snaps, Phaidon's delightful retrospective of his work, will be instantly recognisable. And those that aren't, often prove even more eye-catching. Born Elio Erwitz in 1928 to Russian parents, but raised in America, Erwitt was already a member of the elite Magnum photographic agency when he was in his 20s. The mortgage was paid with high-profile, big-budget colour assignments, but he always carried his hobby camera, a Leica, for his alternative canon, so to speak, of black-and-white, one-take wonders. These second sights make up Snaps, a consciously casual title that captures the essence of Erwitt's professional philosophy as perfectly as he captured his subjects, encapsulating the moment as well as the medium. Put simply, he could not take a bad picture, and this uncropped, unmanipulated collection, reactive rather than conceptual, encapsulates the deceptive simplicity of his sustained talent, from a time when photographers just--snapped.

Most famous for portraits of cute mutts and bug-eyed Chihuahuas in his bestselling Dogdogs, in skirting the sentimental, Erwitt unashamedly embraces the affirmative, yet his compositions are sympathetic and often cheekily playful; one can identify his influence on the likes of Martin Parr, for example. For Snaps, pairs are found for most pictures, to spar or smooch, often across the years or decades, with recurrent studies of juxtaposition, advertising signage, city life, fowl carcasses, children, and something of a leg fetish. Standout images include the famous Nixon/Khrushchev confrontation, stills from the Nevada set of The Misfits, Muhammad Ali mid-fall against Joe Frazier in New York in 1971, a smouldering portrait of Che Guevara, and a brilliant groupshot of Erwitt's fellow Magnum-ites, all obscuring their faces. The sheer quality of his work is also borne out by the less grand images, where he can insinuate the quietly political from the personal, whether a gesture, gait, expression, or the naked human body. In showing another side to 20th-century photography--and Magnum--beyond war reportage, Snaps presents the ridiculous, indomitable beauty of everyday life, and a brilliant career that has celebrated it. --David Vincent

Review:

'This tome shows that he hasn’t lost any of the visual wit that makes one relish his pictures, while, at the same time, recognizing the melancholy that infuses any realization of the arbitrariness of existence.' (Time Out)

'Rare among photographers, Erwitt can make you laugh out loud (just turn to pages 86–87), but his scope is Tolstoyan. This 550-page retrospective will absorb you for years.' (The Independent)

'An essential career-spanning retrospective that reveals Erwitt’s unassuming wit, brilliant framing and deep humanity.' (New York Post)

'Haunting, absorbing, evocative and sometimes funny.' (OK!)

'Poignant and poetic.' (The Herald)

'Saturated with an irrepressible sense of humour and love of humanity. What else would you expect from a man obsessed with dogs?' (Colin Jacobson, Traveller)

'[Erwitt’s] photos reveal a joy in the peculiar playgrounds of human activity ... His eye, modest, charming, graceful and forever peeled for the dazzlingly unexpected, has led his oeuvre being labelled by one commentator as the 'indecisive moment'.' (World of Interiors )

About this edition

• Publisher: Phaidon Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 071484330X
• ISBN 13: 9780714843308
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 512