For an artist to dance between styles like Elliot Erwitt did with this photography is not unprecedented, but it often doesn’t yield greatness. In a career that spanned seven decades, Erwitt navigated the journalistic, commercial, and artistic fields within photography. While as a photographer he might’ve tried to be good at everything, his street photography—a nascent style at the time—was truly great.
Despite a multidisciplinary portfolio, Erwitt is known for his candid and playful monochromatic images—street-level observations of the world. Erwitt rose to prominence in the 1950s, so naturally his images provide a unfiltered window into midcentury Americana.
Offering a timely and critical consideration of his unparalleled life as a photographer, Elliot Erwitt: Home Around the World is a new book from the Aperature Foundation. The monograph follows Erwitt from his early experiments in California to his intimate family portraits in New York. In addition, the book showcases the assignments that took him around the world as a Magnum photographer, such as his portraits of major celebrities and politicians.
Produced in concert with a major retrospective at the University of Texas at Austin, the book features Erwitt’s work alongside essays from industry experts that are based on comprehensive interviews with the photographer. Both the monograph and exhibition explore the less-studied aspects of Erwitt’s photography: his engagement with social and political issues through photojournalism, the humanist qualities of his early work, and his brief stint as a filmmaker.
With over two hundred photographs, Home Around the World is the first volume to offer a comprehensive historical treatment of Erwitt’s body of work and position in the field.
You can order a copy of Home Around the World for $52 here, but enjoy a preview of the book below first. The exhibition at the University of Texas at Austin will be on display until January 1, 2017.
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