“I am a professional photographer by trade and an amateur photographer by vocation,” said the French-born photographer Elliott Erwitt in 1998. A few months earlier, looking back on his archive of “amateur” pictures, he realized that dogs were a subject he had compulsively documented over the years. “Dogs make easy, uncomplaining targets,” he explained, “without the self-conscious hang-ups and possible objections of humans caught on film.”
Erwitt, who died in 2023, at 95, was known for his photographs of benevolent irony. Many featured our four-legged friends. Basset hounds and golden retrievers, tongues out, lounging in the grass, guarded by their human companions. Airedale terriers fetching sticks. Highland terriers leaping with joy. A Scottish terrier who stands alone, fur matching the surrounding trees.
Perhaps Erwitt’s reluctance to take himself seriously was rooted in his early life. Born in Paris in 1928, he was living in Milan with his Russian-Jewish-immigrant parents when the Nazi threat seeped into the country. In 1939, they fled for America. As a teenager in Hollywood, he found work in a commercial darkroom. He also adopted a mutt—ugly but, as he once said, “sensitive and intelligent.”
In 1948, the year he turned 21, Erwitt moved to New York City and traded janitorial work for photography classes at the New School for Social Research. It was around then that he met the Magnum Photos crowd—Edward Steichen, Robert Capa, and Roy Stryker. Photography, once an information source, was becoming more expressionistic.
Through Stryker, Erwitt landed a job at Standard Oil, where he helped build a photographic library. He was later commissioned to document the city of Pittsburgh. By the 1950s, however, his eye was wandering toward the poetry of everyday life. He sold pictures to Collier’s, Look, Life, and Holiday, and he eventually became Magnum’s president, in the late 1960s.
Erwitt’s 1998 book, DogDogs—featuring 500 pages and 820 photographs (he’d aimed for 1,000)—has now been reissued, complete with an essay by P. G. Wodehouse, a dog lover and Erwitt admirer. The oldest photo, from 1948, features a New York Chihuahua. Fifty years later, in 1998, there’s a likable mongrel in Ayutthaya, Thailand. —Elena Clavarino
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at Air Mail
