Photographer Elliott Erwitt, emblematic figure of the Magnum Photos agency, died on Wednesday November 29, we learned on Thursday. “It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of beloved Magnum photographer Elliott Erwitt. He died peacefully at home, surrounded by his family,” the agency’s official account posted in the evening. His daughter Sasha Erwitt confirmed his death to the New York Times.
Born in 1928 in France to Russian immigrant parents, Elliott Erwitt grew up in Italy before emigrating to the United States on the eve of the Second World War. He had resided in New York for decades. Returning to the Magnum agency in 1953, he assumed the presidency. He was a photojournalist for the major illustrated press magazines of the 1950s and 1960s.
In 1960, he was among the photographers who had access to the film set of John Huston’s Désaxés, immortalizing the last filming of Marilyn Monroe. In 2002, in the documentary Marilyn Monroe and The Making Of The Misfits, he returned to these photos with these words: “I suspect people are reading all sorts of things into these photos. If these images weren’t about people who were all sent to heaven prematurely, I don’t think there would be much to say about them. »
For the new album in its collection “100 photos for freedom of the press”, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) recently chose the photographer and his often comical images of humans and dogs taken around the world. The black and white of anonymous people in the streets of New York, Barcelona or on the beach of Rio de Janeiro rub shoulders with shots of Marilyn Monroe reading or Arnold Schwarzenegger as a young bodybuilder… and always images of dogs, often funny, that the photographer considered “people with more hair.”
