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June, 2007Elliott Erwitt
Edwynn Houk
"Elliott Erwitt: Personal best" was a superb introduction to the work of this photographer, who, at age 78 and still making pictures, is justly considered an old master of the medium. Featuring only 34 images selected from more than six decades of work, this show was but a point of entry, as the massive, gorgeous career survey recently published by teNeues attests.
In the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Erwitt captures the strangeness and elegance of what passes for ordinary to the rest of us. Motel Room, Texas, USA, 1962 is a picture of a television set. Balanced on a spindly stand, the box is turned on but not tuned to a channel; it is just beaming pure white light. The stiff floral curtains and checkerboard floor tiles, eerily lit by the TV, are rendered sharply in all their quotidian glory. Like the room's presumptive occupant, we are transfixed by the bright, blank screen.
One of Erwitt's specialties is romance. Pictures from all over the globe dwell on glamour, sweetness, and comedy of courtship and sexual attraction. New York, 1955 is a surreptitious shot of a well-dressed young couple in the backseat of a shiny new automobile, their mouths locked together. Valencia, Spain, 1952 shows a young couple slow-dancing in a humble country kitchen, and Managua, Nicaragua, 1957 is a clever, humorous picture of a peasant woman looking out her window. She is fully dressed, but two gourds sitting on the windowsill line up perfectly with her torso to suggest giant bare breasts. -Rex Weil
New York Times
February 9, 2007''Personal Best''
Edwynn Houk Gallery
745 Fifth Avenue, at 58th Street
Through Feb. 23
It's always said about Elliott Erwitt that he knows how to tell a joke, which is true of course. He has told so many good ones over the years, choosing among them is tough, but one of my favorites is the 1954 photograph he shot in Las Vegas of a dour grandmother in glasses yanking the gun barrel of a painted plaster gunslinger that is really a slot machine. The tacky setting, in the glare of lights, and the deadpan humor -- the plaster cowboy grimacing, the matron, icy cold, like a portly Clint Eastwood with bobby pins, an arrow and the word ''push'' painted on a glass door in the foreground and directly pointing at her head -- lifts the image from the level of sight gag to something approaching an American paradigm. This is Mr. Erwitt's deeper, sometimes obscured, virtue: to show us our world in a tender way that does not deny its darker side.
This latest survey (the Houk gallery seems to reshuffle the deck of his work every year or so) has as its ostensible excuse the publication of ''Elliott Erwitt: Personal Best,'' a truly gigantic doorstop of a volume, weighing in at nearly a dozen pounds, which I suspect is far more than the weight of the Chihuahua he photographed panting beside the ankles of its mistress and her Great Dane. The show takes pains to include his photojournalism and foresighted, noirish views of America, which anticipated Winogrand and others.
Mr. Erwitt's book would be almost perfect save for the frustrating lack of page numbers and all the double-page images with their middles obscured by the gutter. Thirty-four images from the book make up the show, including a couple of views of New York with the prints enlarged so that it is possible to stand before the one of the Flatiron Building on an empty, rain-soaked morning, with a splendid view straight down Fifth Avenue, the triangle of the building echoed by the painted white lines on the converging streets, and imagine yourself right there on the spot. It's a magical effect and a glorious picture.
I also love the shot, again blown up, of the young woman in the bonnet gazing from atop a balcony at the Empire State Building shrouded in fog. And the haunting one of dancers in Finland, caught in silhouette against an open doorway. It puts me in mind of that funny ''60 Minutes'' report, some years back, on how stern Finlanders let loose by learning the tango. They, like Mr. Erwitt, are romantics at heart. MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Village Voice
February 8, 2007He Is a Camera
Elliot Erwitt at the Edwynn Houk Gallery
By R.C. Baker
February 8th, 2007
Elliot Erwitt, still active at 78, has a knack for delivering theatrical spontaneity within sharp and inventive compositions. In one black and white image, a silhouetted man with a huge umbrella leaps high off the ground, his legs in an achingly wide, pointy split; at stage right, two lovers embrace, their own umbrellas crumpling in the wind as the Eiffel Tower rises in the gray distance, a tumescent exclamation point to this narrative of exuberant love. Compare this posed 1989 shot (a clear homage to Cartier-Bresson's Paris pedestrian leaping across a puddle) to Erwitt's iconic photo from the Cold War: Nixon's ski-slope nose thrusts almost as belligerently as the finger he's using to poke Nikita Kruschev's chest during the famous 1959 kitchen debate in Moscow. The high-stakes tension in this bout between two ideological heavyweights is captured through the taut tendons of the vice president's neck and the general secretary's impassive, heavy-lidded glare; a wary functionary leans in, eyeing Tricky Dick's mouth. This broad survey also includes a series of wedding pictures taken in such locales as Siberia, New York, and Israel (which run the emotional gamut from leering lasciviousness to glowing anticipation to nervous uncertainty), and portraits of dogs that make them equal characters in the human drama. Edwynn Houk Gallery, 745 Fifth Avenue. Through February 23.
Elliott Erwitt
Personal Best
January 11 - February 23, 2007
New York
A photographer since 1948 and a member of the prestigious Magnum Photo Agency since 1953, Elliott Erwitt is a keen observer of subjects ranging from major socio-political developments to young lovers in the midst of fledgling romance. Maintaining his pledge, “to capture things that are,” Erwitt’s photography stands as a monument to the humanist tradition taken up by Magnum and its founder, Henri Cartier-Bresson. Embodying both a documentarian, and humoristic impulse, Erwitt’s photographs yield a certain wit, charm, and melancholia. Erwitt states, “Some people say my pictures are sad, some think they’re funny. Funny and sad, aren’t they really the same thing?”
Born on July 26, 1928, in Paris, France, Elliott Erwitt spent his childhood in Milan. His family returned to Paris in 1938 and immigrated to New York the following year. His interest in photography began as a teenager living in Hollywood, California. While a student at Hollywood High School, Erwitt began working in a commercial darkroom developing celebrity portraiture. In 1948, Erwitt moved to New York where he met Magnum photographers: Edward Steichen, Robert Capa and Roy Stryker. As a young member of this elite photographic milieu, Erwitt’s professional career blossomed.
Elliott Erwitt has participated in a variety of one-person exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world including: The Museum of Modern Art, New York;
The Smithsonian Institution; The Art Institute of Chicago; Zurich's Kunsthaus; and Cologne's Photokina. Elliott Erwitt has published over 15 books including Personal Exposure (Norton and Company, 1988), Snaps (Phaidon, 2001), and his most recent, Personal Best (TeNeus, 2006). In tandem with multiple terms as President of the Magnum Photo Agency, Erwitt continues to be one of the leading photographers of his generation.