@ PDN Photo Annual Party Awards 2010
Erwitt's humour is contagious, don't You think?
But now- to the point. I would like to write a little about Erwitt's life this time.
This year, on 26th of July, he celebrated his 82nd birthday. That's quite an achievement in itself, and if You add on top of it that Erwitt is still working professionally on comissions, travelling for few months in a year and doing his own darkroom printing, and publishing books [one every year recently] ..well...isn't it impressive to say the least? I am absolutely in awe.
I wish I could write properly myself, but unfortunately both my language and writing skills are still not the best, so please forgive me that I will use someone elses words to describe the eventful life of Elliott Erwitt, that is John O'Mahony's [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2003/dec/27/photography] to be precise. His description of Erwitt's life really reads like a novel and is full of interesting facts, so please read on, and I hope You'll find it useful!
Elliott Erwitt was born Elio Romano Erwitz in Paris on July 26, 1928. His mother, Eugenia, came from a family of wealthy Moscow merchants who, "like all good girls from such families, was sent around the world from the age of 17 or 18 for the sake of experience". In transit, she met and fell in love with Boris Erwitz, an architecture student originally from Odessa; they were married in Trieste. After the 1917 revolution, Eugenia convinced a reluctant Boris, who was and would remain a committed socialist, to leave Russia for good, settling first in Rome and then moving on to Paris. With their new baby, they then retraced their steps and settled in Milan, where they remained for the next 10 years and where young Elio began school. Even this, however, seemed to offer little in the way of stability: "When I was four my parents separated in Milan in rather acrimonious circumstances, to put it mildly," he says.
Alarmed by the rise of fascism, the Erwitz family, temporarily reunited, were forced to move again, first to France and then, on the eve of the second world war, to the United States: "Actually we left on September 1 and war was declared on the third," he recalls. "It was the last boat to leave."
When he arrived in America, Elliott Erwitt, as he would henceforth be known, spoke no English whatsoever, but was enrolled in Public School 156 in New York City and left to fend for himself. Despite the obvious obstacles, he managed to thrive, and by the time of graduation, was bored enough by lessons to be skiving off to the Museum of Modern Art to peruse the Picassos and Magrittes. Most of the time, he lived with his father on the upper west side of Manhattan, not far from his current Central Park apartment, and visited his mother at weekends.
A few years later, his life was thrown into flux once more when his erratic father, now a less than successful door-to-door salesman, decided to uproot and move to California. Driving all the way, they hawked wristwatches in small towns to survive, finally riding into Los Angeles in the summer of 1941 and settling in a modest house in Hollywood.
Boris Erwitt continued selling watches while Elliott attended Hollywood High. It was here that he "accidentally" took up photography. Attracted more by its gleaming appearance than by its ability to take photographs, he bought a chrome-plated Argos camera. However, he was soon hooked and converted his laundry-room into a dark-room. Later, with funds raised by engraving Boris's watches, Elliott upgraded to a $200 Rolleiflex, his first "real" camera.
The subjects that he initially attempted were the people he found around him - neighbours, pedestrians in the street, surfers flexing their muscles on the beach. However, from the start, he divided his time between taking his own photographs and, to make a living, shooting weddings as well as printing pictures of film stars.
After a few years, Boris had been pushed to the edge of a financial precipice by Californian alimony laws and headed off to sell his wares in New Orleans. At 16, Erwitt was left behind to fend for himself, picking up the lease on his father's one-storey frame house on Fountain Avenue, where he took in boarders for $6 a week. "Those were times when we were down to one meal a day," his friend, the late Eugene Ostroff has said. "We knew somebody who owned a pet shop and he sold horse meat. When we were able to get enough money together we'd buy some horse fillets, get a few bottles of wine and have a banquet." Erwitt says: "We were pre-beatniks. The house had a personality all of its own."
During this period Erwitt began experimenting with unusual photographic processes: "He was trying out a new whirlpool washing technique," Ostroff said. "He would put a roll of freshly developed film in the toilet and flush every 10 minutes. He stopped when a roll of film got away from him."
In 1949, Erwitt headed for New York, convinced that his destiny lay in becoming a professional photographer. He met Valentino Sarra, who arranged for some of his first commercial jobs at the Sarra studio. Their main client was Rheingold beer (a new Miss Rheingold every month). Shortly afterwards, he also met Capa, who helped the young photographer establish more contacts, which led to an assignment in Pittsburgh for the Mellon Foundation, one of his first big photo-essays.
With the outbreak of the Korean war, Erwitt was drafted as an anti-aircraft gunner. "Half of the young men who joined as gunners never came home," he says. But there were no places left in that regiment and Erwitt was assigned as a photographer to a unit based in France. However, he took his own photographs of barracks life, which he entered in a competition run by Life magazine for young photographers, under the title of "Bed and Boredom". In stark contrast to the usual blood and guts emphasis of war photography, Erwitt showed soldiers lounging around, trying to fill time, and he won the second prize and a cash award of $1,500. During his time in France he also picked up a number of commissions from US newspapers, while also taking trips to Spain and Amsterdam to pursue his own projects.
While his career was beginning to take off, his personal life was also gaining momentum. Stationed in Verdun, in the unlikely setting of the local American Express office, he came across a young Dutch woman named Lucienne van Kam, who was working there. They fell in love somewhere in the middle of Erwitt's contorted travel arrangements for a trip to India, and Louie, as she was known, was soon pregnant with their first child. Thanks to some connections and an assignment in Bermuda, where they were hastily married, Louie was able to bypass the strict immigration laws and was granted a visa to the US, where the young couple moved into a $60-a-month apartment on Manhattan's upper east side in the summer of 1953.
It was here that some of Erwitt's most intimate portraits were taken, a collection that remains to this day one of his best: the heavily pregnant Louie lying asleep on the bed with two kittens; or prostrate, with her belly protruding. Erwitt followed Louie's pregnancy photographically right into the delivery room, with Louie clasping her stomach and then holding the new-born child.
to be continued...
Below: scans of pages from Life magazine from November 26th 1951
[ "Bed and Boredom" competition]
Image on the left is Erwitt's- it won him 2nd prize.
