The man who saw the world

In Personal Best we are shown his own hit parade, much of which makes you smile: a naturist shielding her modesty with her knitting; a “gents” lavatory sign leading straight outside; and in 1974 his famed Felix, Gladys and Rover – a great dane’s stripling legs, a woman’s boots, and a chihuahua in a woolly hat, a metropolitan ménage that is homely and absurd at the same time. He is not seeking to thrill or divert, or do anything but present a snap recording of round-the-corner reality, yet Erwitt shows us that the world is sweeter than his Magnum stablemates – war photographers, indignant campaigners, messengers of famine and blight who enjoy the mantle of credibility in their own ranks – would have us believe. His best pictures always leave you wondering: the little black boy grinning and pressing a toy gun against his head in Louisiana in 1952; the fully equipped deep-sea diver emerging from the Serpentine, gesticulating to onlookers as if describing the one that got away – or begging to be let out of the rancid water; the spooky Parisian kids on All Saints’ Day wearing Laurel and Hardy masks. “I went back after the war to Europe in ’49,” he says. “Paris was poor and smelly, and more interesting than now.” Erwitt has been publishing books for 30 years, from his earliest on American architecture through collections on men and women, dogs, beaches and museums. In the compilation of his latest he kept surprising himself with gems he didn’t know he had, such as a “new” Che Guevara in Cuba in 1964, and a pre-presidential JFK.

Like an elderly woman stumbling across an ex-lover’s diamonds, he was lost in remembrance. As he studied his contact sheets, images jolted him back into a past that most of us never have occasion to rediscover but is always lurking in a photographer’s archive. His favourite of the new finds records a group of British ex-servicemen begging after the war. He wasn’t thinking of the issue of returning soldiers at the time: he just turned a corner in London and there they were playing banjos and a trumpet, looking sad and embarrassed, the lame ones leading the blind.

He rarely stages or directs his subjects. “I don’t have anything against it, though,” he says. “I’m not a purist. You are powerful as a photographer. You can make people do all kinds of silly things, but a lot of times they don’t need directing.” And he is not averse to silliness himself: he is known for barking at the dogs he photographs, and for blowing a bicycle horn to attract a passer-by’s or a sitter’s attention. But these are the only tricks of his trade. He laughs if you ask him how he works, saying: “You put the film in your camera.” Though he is a romantic who claims that the best conditions for photographing men and women are “warm weather and a shower of light”, he doesn’t make an obsession of the tender like his late friend Doisneau, or the seedy like Brassai, or misfits like Diane Arbus. He shoots whatever catches his eye, and discovers the parallels and hidden similarities back in his darkroom.

Erwitt was an early member of the Magnum co-operative, founded on the principle of photographers retaining rights to their work after publication. At 78 he is its twinkliest of elder statesmen, but also a staunch dissenter in a profession that, to his disappointment, is increasingly embroiled in celebrity, public relations and digital enhancement that can lengthen Kate Winslet’s legs or put back the leaves on an autumn tree – the computer magic of Photoshop software, and all the other meddling paraphernalia of our picture-perfect demands. He works the old-fashioned way, seeming quite content to be commissioned less as the years go by. Erwitt simply accepts the fact and concentrates on work for books and exhibitions instead of banks and airlines and fashion houses, carving out chunks of his year to travel. Last year he spent time at an Italian village, photographing buildings and people, just because someone had mentioned it was worth a visit. “It turned out it wasn’t that interesting,” he says. “But it might have been.” Did his wife accompany him or keep the home fires burning? “Oh no,” he chuckles of his German wife, Pia Frankenberg, a film-maker and novelist, “my wife has her own fires to stoke.”

They live with their cairn terrier, Sammy, in a house in Bridgehampton, Long Island, and an eighth-floor apartment on Central Park with his studio in the former basement laundry, meaning he can take the lift to work. “It saves on taxi fares.” Had his itinerant schedule been hard to combine with domestic life? “Photographers are bad risks for women,” he says. But four marriages? “It’s not so unusual compared to my colleagues. The only unusual thing about me is I married those ladies.”

Maybe it is not so surprising that the constancy of a faithful dog appeals to Erwitt. Never mind the bumpy private life – his childhood, though not unhappy, was one of continual uprooting, as his Russian parents fled persecution and hardship, then the law. His dilettante Jewish father, Boris, and aristocratic mother, Eugenia, first emigrated to Italy, then fled Mussolini in 1938 with little “Elio” (born in Paris) to France, catching the last safe-passage ship to America. “War was declared while we were on high seas,” says Erwitt. “I remember the ship being dark because U-boats were so active.” Arriving in New York without a word of English, his family moved to Los Angeles, where he zoomed though school – a bright refugee grateful for a new home. When his parents separated he lived with his father, who eventually moved to New Orleans to dodge alimony payments, and from the age of 16 Erwitt fended for himself.

His only “secure employment” was being drafted into the army for two years in 1951, a day job that was meant to see him join the anti-aircraft gunnery but, owing to a lack of places, landed him as a photographic assistant. He rose to the rank of corporal just before being decommissioned – a bid to make him stay – but he had entered a Life magazine competition with pictures of barracks life. His snapshot of the Korean war, with soldiers lounging about filling time, won second prize, which he rationalised as the best result. “There’s a chance for advancement. If you win, where do you go?”

In fact, he never stopped going places. Having moved back to New York in 1946, he met the founders of Magnum – Edward Steichen, Roy Stryker, and the glamorous playboy war photographer Robert Capa (one-time boyfriend of Ingrid Bergman), who died at 41. “Dying young is a great career move,” says Erwitt wryly. “Monroe would have been 80 this year – just unimaginable, isn’t it?” All three mentors were impressed by his talent, but perhaps Stryker was the most generous. “When he met me he saw I was broke and he pulled a hundred bucks out of his pocket and told me to go and take pictures.” Work for Holiday magazine and Life followed. He grabbed it all and has never stopped. “This art business,” he says, “is fairly recent. Most of us were just making a living: we never thought that what we did would be valuable on the art market.”

Magnum was a home for a natural wanderer, with its great luminaries like Cartier-Bresson, whose picture of a train depot had inspired Erwitt early on, and his friends and contemporaries such as Burt Glinn, and the late Inge Morath, who replaced Monroe as Arthur Miller’s wife. As an accredited White House photographer, he worked with the charismatic, cigar-chomping journalist Pierre Salinger, who later became JFK’s press secretary: an insider status that led to Erwitt’s recording of the beginning and the end of the Camelot era. Personal Best boasts a previously unpublished picture of Kennedy at the Democratic convention in 1960, just a face in the corner of the shot, smoking, full of confidence for the future and his part in it. Three years later came an unforgettable close-up of his widow Jacqueline, distraught and incredulous, behind the stars-and-stripes-draped coffin. The pictures that made his name, however, were taken in Moscow, reconnecting him with his Russian heritage. Early coups included pictures of the October anniversary parade at the time of the 1957 Sputnik launch, which he got by attaching himself to a Soviet TV crew. More famous still was the 1959 “kitchen debate” picture of Nixon and Khrushchev bickering about who was richer, the former jabbing the other in the lapel.

A scene of diplomatic meltdown unthinkable in our post-cold-war chumminess, it was a gift for Erwitt, who was at an industrial fair in Moscow taking pictures of fridges for the manufacturer Westinghouse. “Luck is a big part of it. I was in the right place at the right time. I was in Macy’s kitchen when they came by. In the Soviet Union during the bad years, you had a minder stopping you from doing things, but because I spoke Russian I could understand what was going on. It was a wonderful place to take pictures, but when it opened up it was less interesting. When Gorbachev took over, I didn’t go back.”

Though still grateful for the welcome afforded his family by the US, Erwitt claims that it is currently impossible to feel warm about America, with its prosecution of a war in which “the great unwashed were lied to”. Would he like to photograph President Bush? “I’m so disgusted by Bush. If I had the opportunity of doing something that made my opinion of him clear I’d be delighted, but who is going to give you that?”

For all his lightness of touch, the political statements in Erwitt’s pictures are starkly resonant; more organic than constructed, seeming to emerge despite himself. He was not intending to address the injustice of racism when he took his iconic 1950 image of segregated drinking fountains in North Carolina. The result has been used ever since, at first as a spur to change and later as a reminder of bad-old-days bigotry, but he refuses to wear any badges for activism or altruism. “These are just things you see. You don’t have to look for anything. It is all there.” Never more so maybe than the pictures of the World Trade Center’s twin towers juxtaposed in the new book with a row of US rockets, symbols of a phallocentric superpower that is not as invulnerable as its citizens once believed. He was at home in the city on September 11, 2001, but has no pictures of the devastation or efforts to clear the site. “I didn’t want to go and photograph it. I went to the blood bank instead.” Too grim? He pauses: “You know, I just don’t know.”

There are no famous faces he would like to photograph: celebrities and office cleaners are all the same to him. He seems to have been entirely underwhelmed by Marilyn Monroe, for example, whose decline he witnessed on the set of her last completed movie, The Misfits, as she scuttled back and forth from LA to New York to see her shrink. Besides, her expertise before the camera made her an unnatural subject for him. “She was a nice person, a little nuts about appointments. She looked better in pictures than in the flesh. There was nothing fascinating for me about her. I didn’t want to take her picture all the time. Some photographers did. I don’t know if that was because she was so interesting for them, maybe more because she was a very commercial subject.”

When I ask him if he brings an assistant on trips, he laughs: “I’m not in the Annie Leibovitz category yet.” Two years ago, on assignment for The Times, he was ejected by Leibovitz’s assistant and still doesn’t fully understand why; the grande dame was mortified and sent flowers, but his worst fears were confirmed. “She’s a fancy lady and she’s protected by a lot of afraid people. They thought I wanted something from her.” His daughter, who arranges celebrity shoots for Vanity Fair, tells him “stunning” stories of celebrities’ demands, water at a certain temperature – “stupid things” – while agents are demanding guarantees of covers and spreads. As someone who travels economy with his father’s good-luck Buddha in his equipment case, does he feel he should be cosseted more? “Maybe travel business class, but that’s all.” One feels he wouldn’t want to make demands, be seen as egotistical. What matters most is his relationship with those he works for, that they be “nice”. In the late 1970s and the 1980s he made numerous films for the TV network HBO, which had picked up on his documentary about Texas cheerleaders, Beauty Knows No Pain, stopping because the organisation’s chain of command changed and “a nasty lady was in charge, so I went back to my day job”.

A couple of days after our meeting, I bumped into him at Magnum’s summer party at a gallery in London. He was wearing a T-shirt declaring “Digital Manipulation Kills Photography”. Having had 100 or so printed, he had brought them along to give out to sympathisers with the cause, of which there were many present. It seemed a rebellious stance for a near-octogenarian, but of all the old-timers celebrating the collective – 93-year-old Eve Arnold and 81-year-old Burt Glinn – Erwitt has remained impervious to the fatigue, grumpiness and cynicism of advancing years. The subject of the Magnum meeting that day had been “the concerned photographer”, of which he is one in the sense of caring for his work and its place in the world, and not one at all in the sense of earnest self-importance.

Watching him, slightly tipsy and almost pinned against the wall by two leggy young admirers, he was having a ball. Not much gets him down, I’d ventured in our interview. “Lawyers get me down,” he had replied. Not just divorce lawyers, he clarified, but the ones acting in his recent suit with his former publisher Phaidon, a nasty and, in his view, “unnecessary” battle over a breach of contract as perceived by the company. The affair has seriously dented his retirement fund, so Erwitt must keep working, travelling, surprising himself with extraordinary photographs he’d forgotten he’d taken. “I would have wanted to keep photographing anyway,” he adds, unnecessarily. “I’m already thinking of my next book title – Second Best! What do you think?”

Personal Best by Elliott Erwitt (teNeues, £70) is published on August 28. It is available from BooksFirst for £63 including p&p. Tel: 0870 165 8585