edward steichen – ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon

The Photography of Elliot Erwitt

Born Elio Romano Erwitz in July of 1928, Elliott Erwitt was a French-American documentary and commercial photographer as well as a film director. Born to Jewish-Russian parents in Paris, he spent his early years in Milan, Italy, The Erwitz family emigrated in 1939 to the United States where they settled in the Los Angeles area of California.

After securing a position at a commercial darkroom, Erwitt studied photography and film making at the Los Angeles City College. In 1948, he relocated to New York City where he continued his studies at the New School for Social Research. Among the photographers Erwitt met in New York were Edward Steichen, Robert Capa and Roy Stryker who had founded the photo-documentary project for the Farm Security Administration.

During 1949, Erwitt traveled throughout France and Italy where he shot a series of images with his Rolleiflex camera. Upon his return, Roy Stryker hired Erwitt to build a photographic library for the public relations department of the Standard Oil Company. In collaboration with other photographers, Erwitt next worked on Stryker’s project to establish the Pittsburgh Photographic Library, a depository of prints and negatives relating to the history of Pittsburgh that was incorporated into the city’s Carnegie Library.

Elliott Erwitt was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1951 and served as a photographer for the Army Signal Corps in Germany and France until his discharge from duty in 1953. Returning to civilian life, he joined photojournalist Robert Capa’s Magnum Photos, the first cooperative agency for worldwide freelance photographers. Erwitt began a freelance photographer career and created work for “Life”, “Holiday, “Collier’s”, “Look”, and other illustrated publications of the period.

In addition to his commercial work, Erwitt documented social and political events in his photographs. He covered, among others, the tenth anniversary in 1957 of Russia’s October Revolution, President Nixon’s 1959 visit to the Soviet Union, the funeral service for President Kennedy in 1963, and the 2009 inauguration of President Barack Obama. Through Magnum Photos, Erwitt was hired to document film production on several movie sets. He captured iconic images of Marlon Brando on the set of “On the Waterfront” and Marilyn Monroe during filming of “The Seven Year Itch”. Throughout his career, Erwitt continued to have access to the world’s notable figures and shot portraits of Fidel Castro, Jacqueline Kennedy, Che Guevara and Jack Kerouac among others.

Elliott Erwitt was known for his warm, wry sense of humor in the depiction of everyday scenes. He took many black and white candid images of ironic or absurd situations that occurred in ordinary settings. Dogs were also a regular motif in Erwitt’s work. Although he never specifically set out to take dog pictures, dogs appeared in substantial numbers on his contact sheets. Among Erwitt’s twenty-seven volumes of published work, five of them are collections whose focus is exclusive to dogs. Two of these volumes are the 1974 “Son of Bitch”, his first collection, and 1998 “Dog Dogs”, a series taken during Erwitt’s world travels.

Elliott Erwitt devoted his attention towards film making during the 1970s and 1980s. He produced feature films, television commercials and several notable documentaries. Among Erwitt’s documentaries are the 1970 “Arthur Penn: The Director”, “Red, White and Bluegrass” in 1973, and the award-winning 1977 “Glassmakers of Herat, Afghanistan”. He produced numerous programs and movies for HBO in the 1980s, including “The Great Pleasure Hunt”, a series of comedic travel documentaries. Erwitt is credited as camera operator for the 1970 “Gimme Shelter” and still photographer for the 2005 “Bob Dylan: No Direction Home”.

A large-scale retrospective of Erwitt’s work, “Elliot Erwitt: Personal Best”, was held in 2011 at the International Center for Photography in New York City. In the same year, he received the ICP’s Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement. Elliott Erwitt died at his New York home at the age of ninety-five on the twenty-ninth of November in 2023 while sleeping.

Notes: A documentary film by Adriana Lopez Sanfeliu entitled “Elliott Erwitt: Silence Sounds Good” by Camera Lurid Productions is located at: http://www.cameralucida.fr/en/Documentaries/elliott-erwitt

Top Insert Image: Betina La Plante, “Elliott Erwitt”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Elliot Erwitt, “USA, Times Square, New York City”, 1950, Gelatin silver Print, Magnum Photos

Third Insert Image: Elliot Erwitt, “Cuba, Havana, Che Guevara”, 1964, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Elliot Erwitt, “USA, New York City, Marlene Dietrich”, 1959, Gelatin Silver Print

Photography by Edward Jean Steichen

Born on March 27, 1879, Edward Jean Steichen was a Luxembourg-born American painter, photographer and curator, who was a key figure in the development of twentieth-century photography. His parents, Jean-Pierre and Marie Kamp Steichen, emigrated with their son Edward to the United States in 1880, originally settling in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and later moving to Milwaukee in 1899.

Steichen, at the age of fifteen in 1894, began attending Pio Nono College, a Catholic boys’ high school where his drawing skill was first noticed. Quitting high school, he began a four year lithography apprenticeship with the American Fine Art Company of Milwaukee. Steichen acquired his first camera in 1895, joined with his friends in forming the Milwaukee Art Students League, and first exhibited his photographs at the Philadelphia Salon in 1899. Becoming a naturalized citizen in 1900, he traveled frequently between 1900 and 1922 to Paris to practice his painting.

After exhibiting in the Chicago Salon, Steichen received encouragement from photographer Clarence White, who would later establish the first educational institution in America to teach photography as a fine art. He was elected in 1901 as a member of London’s Linked Ring Brotherhood which promoted photography as one of the fine arts. In 1902 Steichen cofounded, along with White and photographer and art patron Alfred Stieglitz, the Photo-Secession movement.

Edward Steichen began experimenting in 1904 with color photography, becoming one of the earliest to use the Autochrome process patented in France by Louis and Auguste Lumière. He also designed the first cover of Alfred Stieglitz’s quarterly photographic journal “Camera Work” which would frequently publish Steichen’s work. In Manhattan, New York, he helped Stieglitz found the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, establishing the first American foothold for modern art of all media.

After high quality half-tone reproductions of photographs became possible, the genre of fashion photography became possible as a fine art. Most of the credit for this goes to French portrait photographer Baron Adolph de Meyer and to Edward Steichen, who began in 1907 photographing well-dressed ladies strolling the Longchamp Racecourse at the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. Gven the task by publisher Lucien Vogel in 1911 to promote fashion as a fine art, Steichen took photos of couturier Paul Poiret’s designer gowns. Two of these in color were published in the April 1911 issue of the magazine “Art et Décoration”. The photos were done in a creative, soft-focus, aesthetically retouched style, idealizing the garment beyond the exact description of its fabric and buttons, and making a strong distinction from former hard, sharp commercial images.

In 1942, Edward Steichen curated New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “Road to Victory”, photographs by enlisted members of the Armed forces, including some made by automatic cameras of Navy planes engaged in fighting. Five duplicates of this exhibition toured the world. In 1940, the first department of photography in a museum was inaugurated at MOMA and was headed by art historian and photographer Beaumont NewHall. In 1947 Steichen was appointed Director of Photography, a position he used to expand and organize the collection, recognizing new generations of photographers and showing early works of Henry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Rauschenberg.

Among his accomplishments during his term as Director of Photography, Edward Steichen created the MOMA world-touring exhibition “The Family of Man”, a collection of five hundred photos depicting life, love, and death in sixty-eight countries. It was seen by nine million visitors and still holds the record for the most-visited photography exhibition. “The Family of Man” is now permanently housed, on continuous display, at Clervaux Castle in northern Luxembourg, the country of Steichen’s origin.

Steichen’s career, especially his activities at the Museum of Modern Art, did much to popularize and promote the medium of photography. Both before and since his death in March of 1973, photography, including his own, continued to appreciate as a collectible art form. In 2006, Steichen’s early 1904 pictorialist photograph “The Pond-Moonlight”, showing a wooded area and pond in Mamaroneck, New York, sold for US 2.9 million dollars. Steichen achieved the impression of color by manually applying layers of light-sensitive gums to the paper (the autochrome process not being available until 1907). Only three prints of “The Pond-Moonlight”, two being in museums, are known to exist.

Insert Image: Edward Steichen, “Bryant Park Breadline, New York”, 1933, Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection