Life [tuː]

And so continuing from an earlier post featuring John O'Mahony's article- here is a further story of Erwitt's convoluted life:

Capa had promised Erwitt a job on his release from the army, so one of the first things he did was drive to the New York office of Magnum, the photographers' collective founded by Capa, Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David Seymour on the principle that a photographer should retain the rights to his work after publication.

Erwitt's first major commission after he signed with the agency came in 1954, a photo-essay on children for Holiday magazine. This resulted in another of his early memorable photos, a shot of a young boy in a small town in Wyoming who lived with his grandparents and whose cowboy father was coming to visit. Erwitt captured the pair in an offhand embrace, with both on the edge of tears. It wasn't quite what Holiday was looking for ("too sad" was the verdict) and never ran, though it still features in his books and exhibitions.

Back in New York, he picked up work photographing celebrities such as Jack Kerouac and Roald Dahl. Through Magnum he became set photographer on a number of films, including On the Waterfront and The Misfits, where his studies of Marilyn Monroe on the verge of collapse have a wrenching poignancy. Other film stars in his portfolio were Humphrey Bogart, Grace Kelly, Marlene Dietrich and Vera Miles (with an avuncular Hitchcock looking on). Assignments took him to Nicaragua, Hiroshima, Pakistan and Mexico.

However, his reputation was secured by a number of landmark assignments during the late 50s and early 60s, all of them courtesy of his homeland, Russia. The first took place in the summer of 1959 when Erwitt was sent to Moscow to get pictures of an industrial fair. By coincidence he arrived on the same day that vice-president Richard Nixon was due to appear with Communist party chairman Nikita Khrushchev. In front of a model kitchen, which had been assembled by Macy's department store, Khrushchev launched into the infamous "kitchen debate" with Nixon.

"It was ridiculous," Erwitt recalls. "Nixon was saying, 'We're richer than you are', and Khrushchev would say, 'We are catching up and we will surpass you.' That was the level of the debate. At one point Nixon was getting so irritating I thought I heard Khrushchev say in Russian 'Go fuck my grandmother'." More importantly Erwitt got a snap of Nixon belligerently prodding Khrushchev in the lapel, which later appeared on posters during Nixon's presidential bid.

The second high point also involved a trip to Moscow where Erwitt was on assignment for Holiday magazine when the first Sputnik was launched; his photographs of a lecture at Moscow's planetarium appeared on the cover of the New York Times magazine. Up to that point, no western journalist had managed to get pictures of the October anniversary parade but Erwitt tagged along with a Soviet TV crew and managed to pass five security lines, setting up his camera right by Lenin's mausoleum: "Although I was questioned by a guard, I was able to convince them that I belonged to the parade. I shot three or four quick rolls and then raced to my hotel room a few blocks away, where I processed them in the bath."

The third key assignment took place in 1966 when Erwitt was again in Moscow, on an assignment to photograph President de Gaulle for Paris Match. After growing tired of the staged publicity, he returned to his hotel room. However, he immediately grew anxious that he had given in so readily and returned to find that De Gaulle and the Soviet leadership, including President Leonid Brezhnev and prime minister Andrei Kosygin, had retired to an inner meeting room where Erwitt was given free rein to photograph them in the most casual of settings. "They didn't question my presence because I acted natural." The picture again made the cover of Paris Match and was run worldwide.

to be continued....

Few images that were mentioned in today's extract:

1st commission for Holiday magazine, 1954

Covering the 40th anniversary of Russian revolution in Moscow, 1957

Charles de Gaulle in USSR, 1966

One thing is without doubt tying it all together- it's being "in the right place at the right time". Certainly Erwitt has a great intuition as to what might happen and how to behave in order to absorb all the best from the situation. 


[ Article excerpt from The Guardian ]