Elliott Erwitt – PERSONAL BEST

Elliott Erwitt is one of the most widely known photographers in his lifetime, he was a member of the Magnum agency for 70 years after being invited to join by Robert Capa. He documented politicians and presidents – famously capturing in black and white a bereft Jackie Kennedy at the funeral of her husband John F. Kennedy in 1963. He photographed celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart, but also the absurd, intimate, and humorous moments of his fellow man and of course, his beloved and treasured canine subjects, resulting in several books devoted to them including DogDogs, Son of Bitch and Woof.

“Most of the time…when I am out of the house, I carry a small unobtrusive camera and I snap away obsessively at things that interest me… I never set out to take dog pictures but somehow dogs appeared in large numbers on my contact sheets…”

Erwitt was born in Paris on 26 July 1928 to Russian immigrants. He grew up in Italy and France and in 1939 the family finally settled in America. His love and affinity with photography grew from living in Hollywood as a teenager and by the age of twenty, he was working as a photographer in New York where he met Edward Steichen and Roy Stryker head of the Farm Security Administration. Stryker hired Erwitt to work for the Oil Standards Company and later to document the city of Pittsburgh. Fortuitously he also met Robert Capa in New York in 1953 and the rest is now history. In 1970, Erwitt turned his attention to the moving image making films and working in television – in the 1980s he produced eighteen comedy films for HBO. The last decades of his life were spent sharing his life’s work through photography exhibitions and photographic books.

Leica Gallery London is honoured to show a selection of seminal images from the Leica touring exhibition, Personal Best. In 2023 Elliott Erwitt was the thirteenth recipient of the Leica Hall of Fame Award in Wetzlar, Germany for his contribution to photography. During his career he published more than 25 books and over 45 years won virtually every international award possible.