"Ritz Hotel, Paris"

gelatin silver print

signed, titled and dated (pencil) on verso

Elliott Erwitt is the photographer who doesn't want to be serious. You have to look a long time in Elliott Erwitt's work to find anything gruesome. Rather, his photographs become a seemingly endless string of corny jokes. A horse seems to smile in the face of men trying to repair an old truck. A bulldog replaces the head of the man on whose lap it sits by the chosen perspective. Or on an open shelf, two small pumpkins lie exactly at chest height of the old woman behind them. Erwitt calls such pictures not snapshots, but grave shots. They are moments that make it difficult for the viewer to take the world excessively seriously.
In the many reportages he has made as a Magnum photographer for the world's best-known magazines, there is always a moment of melancholy. Then one suspects that for Elliott Erwitt even the joke becomes a kind of self-protection. He is the clown who would like to escape the pitfalls of the world, who longs for something of which he has only a vague idea.
(Freddy Langer, FAZ, 2010)