Elliott Erwitt (b. 1928 Paris, American) spent his formative years in Europe before moving to the United States, where he would meet his mentors: the prominent photographers Edward Steichen, Robert Capa, and Roy Stryker. His extensive travels contributed to a distinguished style that captured life's absurdities with humane candor and shaped the golden period of editorial photography and magazines such as Collier’s, Holiday, Look, and LIFE. The works titled New York (1949) and Wilmington, North Carolina (1950) reflect Erwitt’s tributes to places and sites that he admired and documented throughout his career.
–Affinities and Outliers: Highlights from the University at Albany Fine Art Collections

American, born Paris, 1928

 

Elliott Erwitt spent his formative years in Italy and France before moving to Los Angeles via New York in 1939. In 1946 he met Edward Steichen, Robert Capa, and Roy Stryker, who became significant mentors. In 1948–50 he studied film at the New School for Social Research before enrolling in the U.S. Army. Upon his discharge from the military, Erwitt settled in New York and became a member of the Magnum Photos agency; he is still an active member. He has continued to travel and photograph, capturing the famous and the ordinary, the strange and the mundane, in an ironic style that foregrounds life's absurdities with humane candor.

 

Erwitt’s books, journalistic essays, and advertisements have been featured in publications around the world, and his work has been exhibited at such museums as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago; and Kunsthaus, Zurich.

–Regarding Place: Photographs From The University Art Collections