A Master With a Sense of Humor

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Elliott Erwitt is a prolific and versatile photographer well known for his wry sense of humor. Most of the 61 black-and-white photographs currently on view at the Edwynn Houk Gallery are funny to some degree, and all illustrate a natural and consummate understanding of the way the camera creates a picture. That is, most people would have walked past many of the sites where Mr. Erwitt took these pictures without noticing anything worth bothering to record, but he saw possibilities, and had the talent and technical skill to realize them.


The first picture in the exhibition is “Self-Portrait, Los Angeles” (1945), which predates the work in the body of the show and presents the 17-year-old artist in something of a parody of teenage angst, defiance, and soulfulness. He stands in what is probably his bedroom, lit by one light source to the left of the camera that casts an ominous shadow on the wall to the right. His body seems rigid although slightly slouched, with the arm toward the camera stiff and ending in a clenched fist. Beneath his tousled black hair, his face turns toward the lens and, half in deep shadow, affects the knowing bravado that is the immemorial signature of teenage helplessness. The sweetness of this image presages much that follows.


“Self-Portrait” is a constructed picture, entirely set up by the photographer, but “Puerto Rico” (1969), is the sort most people would simply walk past. The subject is so slight it hardly makes sense in a description. There is a wall, probably of a house, covered with the sort of asphalt siding that is made to look like bricks although it never really does. There is a window with a crude frame of white wood, and closed shutters that also are covered with the asphalt-ersatz-brick siding. Beyond that, there is a little shadow in the upper righthand corner that hints at the roof, a section of a shrub at the lower left, and a bit of the concrete base beneath the siding – details that provide a sense of particularity. In other words, nothing spectacular.


The point of the picture is that using fake brick to cover a window looks silly. But mentioning that is like explaining the punch line of a joke: It may help people understand, but it’s not likely to make them laugh. You get it, or you don’t. Beyond that, Mr. Erwitt demonstrates his visual sophistication by the simplicity of the composition. He includes everything he needs to make his picture, and nothing extraneous.


Another example is his very well known “New York City, New York” (1974). The front legs of a huge dog (a Great Dane?) are on the left, a pair of expensive-looking woman’s highleather boots and the bottom of a tweed coat are in the middle, and on the right a repulsively cute itty-bitty dog wearing a precious little cap.The picture deals with class and affectations in a city where dog walkers achieve status on the basis of their animals’ pedigrees and singularity.


Mr. Erwitt’s talent here is in his choice of perspective. By bringing the lens of the camera down towards the ground until it is nose-to-nose with the rat-size dog on the right, he makes the viewer a fellow Lilliputian in a world of Brobdingnagian pretensions. If he had shot the picture from normal eye-level, the humor would have been largely vitiated.


In “Untitled” (1953), it is the radical use of selective focus that creates the picture. Looking down, Mr. Erwitt shot his naked knees and feet; that’s all there is in this picture. If you look down the length of your own body, your eye will have both your knees and feet in focus, but the mechanical lens of the camera can be made to see differently, and Mr. Erwitt set his f/stop and distance so that only the feet are in sharp focus. The legs and knees are two white fuzzy columns, hardly substantial enough to support the weight of a person.


In “Arkansas” (1954), it is the manipulation of the tonal range that gives the picture meaning. A bevy of young women in bathing suits are arrayed on a catwalk as part of a beauty pageant, lit from behind by intense spotlights. Mr. Erwitt set his camera’s exposure so that the background and the shadowed parts of the women’s bodies are lost in blackness, and only a narrow ribbon of white outlines each of the figures. The loss of the middle ground – of the grays – reduces the women to almost identical shapes, like mechanical objects on an assembly line, and transforms what would otherwise be a fairly ordinary image into one with bite.


In “New York City, New York” (1949), it is again perspective that creates the picture. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s statue of Diana by Augustus Saint-Gaudens is shown from behind: She seems to be aiming her fearsome bow and arrow at a man we see receding down a long hallway. In all likelihood the man was unaware he had any relationship with the statue, but Mr. Erwitt positioned himself so his camera would create one.


Over a long career, most of it while associated with Magnum, Mr. Erwitt worked as a photojournalist, a fashion photographer, and a commercial photographer. In the heyday of picture magazines, Mr. Erwitt’s photograph of Richard Nixon wagging his finger at Nikita Khrushchev’s chest during the famous “Kitchen Debate” in Moscow in 1959 became one of the defining images of the Cold War. He was also capable of as tender an image as his 1953 “Mother and Child,” a picture that made it into the Museum of Modern Art’s “Family of Man” exhibition. (“New York City” [1953], at Houk, must have been taken at the same time and is as moving.) Many of the vintage prints in the present show are printed on 5-inch-by-7-inch paper with no diminution of impact, an indication of how powerfully the images are realized.


Elliott Erwitt, a master.


Until January 14 (745 Fifth Avenue, between 57th and 58th Streets, fourth floor, 212-750-7070).


The New York Sun

© 2024 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

or
By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use