Mention Elliott Erwitt and most people picture the wry New Yorker with a Leica at his hip, the man who turned dogs into walking punch lines and froze Richard Nixon wagging a finger at Nikita Khrushchev.
After seventy years behind the viewfinder his work has filled coffee-table monographs, documentary reels and museum walls around the world, yet many corners of his story remain stubbornly underexposed. The following ten curiosities pull back the curtain on the immigrant kid who swept classrooms to pay tuition, the prankster who invented a pompous alter ego to lampoon the art market and the disciplined craftsman who limited himself to one roll a day. Think of this piece as a guided stroll along the contact sheets that rarely leave the archive drawer. By the end you may discover that the photographer who made us laugh at terriers in trench coats was also a savvy navigator of geopolitics, commerce and technological change.
1. His passport once read Elio Romano Erwitz
Erwitt was born in Paris in 1928 to Russian émigré parents who named him Elio Romano. The family hopped between Italy and France before landing in the United States in 1939 with war looming. Keen to blend in at public school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Elio quietly tweaked his name. Elliott felt American, Erwitt replaced Erwitz, and the new moniker stuck for the rest of his career. The adjustment was more than cosmetic; it signaled a lifelong knack for observing without attracting attention, a skill that later let him melt into crowds from Havana to Paris.
2. He mopped floors to pay for film school
Long before Magnum accepted him, the adolescent Erwitt enrolled in evening classes at the New School for Social Research. Tuition was steep for a teenager whose parents juggled factory work, so he took a janitorial job on campus. From dusk until midnight he emptied trash cans and scrubbed blackboards; at dawn he developed negatives in the school darkroom that he earned free access to by cleaning it. The routine taught him thrift, precision and the value of every frame. When digital memory cards later promised thousands of exposures, Erwitt still preferred to carry just enough film to fill his pockets, convinced that scarcity sharpens vision.
3. Two cameras, two missions
Anyone who crossed paths with Erwitt on assignment noticed he wore two rangefinder bodies across his chest. One was loaded for the client, the other for himself. He called this arrangement “creative obedience versus private mischief”. A magazine might request a polished portrait of a diplomat; his personal camera would snag the diplomat’s aide yawning under the hot lights. At day’s end he delivered the required images, then filed the off-beat negatives into the shoe boxes that later fed his most personal books. The tactic let him satisfy editors without suppressing the eccentric humor that made his reputation.
4. Tri-X or nothing
While peers chased Kodachrome’s saturated palette in the 1950s, Erwitt clung to Kodak Tri-X 400 black-and-white film. He prized its gritty grain and forgiving latitude in Europe’s fog, Cuba’s glare and Moscow’s overcast gloom. Even in his nineties he claimed that if someone handed him a camera tomorrow he would still load Tri-X, meter for the shadows and let the highlights fend for themselves. Familiarity with the emulsion’s quirks saved him technical headaches on location and left more mental bandwidth for timing, gesture and composition.
5. Dogs were a pragmatic subject
Asked why canines crowd his gallery walls, Erwitt famously quipped, “Dogs don’t ask for prints.” Behind the joke lies hard economic logic. In the mid-century magazine market, children and pets sold covers; adult sitters demanded contracts. Dogs posed willingly, accepted payment in biscuits and never complained about double chins. More important, they served as visual foils for human foibles. A pair of poodles clipped like bouffant socialites or a dachshund straining against a limousine door could lampoon class pretensions without risking libel. The humor was gentle yet barbed and it earned him universal readership.
6. He invented a pompous alter ego named André S. Solidor
By 2009 the contemporary art scene overflowed with glossy nudes underwater, rhinestone-studded skulls and six-figure editions. Erwitt responded by fabricating André S. Solidor, initials spelling ASS, a mythical European auteur whose portfolio dripped with kitsch clichés: fish wearing bow ties, models wrapped in bubble wrap, swans flying through neon hoops. Galleries exhibited the spoof work in earnest, critics penned solemn essays and only later did some realize they had applauded satire. The stunt proved that the emperor’s new clothes still made excellent copy and that Erwitt’s comedy chops remained razor-sharp in his eighties.
7. The Nixon–Khrushchev “Kitchen Debate” photo began as a refrigerator shoot
Erwitt traveled to Moscow in 1959 on a Westinghouse commission to illustrate gleaming American appliances at the U.S. National Exhibition. While he adjusted lights inside a model kitchen Vice President Richard Nixon barged in with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The men sparred over capitalism, pointing fingers at each other beside the dishwasher. Erwitt fired instinctively, capturing a frame that Time later published as a symbol of Cold War bravado. Westinghouse paid him the standard day rate; Nixon’s campaign staff reproduced the image on posters without negotiating usage fees. Rather than sue, the photographer shrugged that history sometimes commandeers its own icons.
8. He directed eighteen comedy shorts for HBO
When cable television sought cheap, original content in the early 1980s, HBO approached Erwitt to translate his street wit to the screen. He wrote and directed a series of five-minute sketches starring everyday New Yorkers: subway preachers competing for coins, roller-skating nannies, tuxedoed dogs at Central Park weddings. Shot in static wide frames and black-and-white stock, the shorts looked like moving contact sheets. Critics praised their deadpan timing although they aired at odd hours and soon vanished into the network vault. The experiment confirmed that Erwitt’s humor could survive beyond the still image.
9. A Bolex in Afghanistan preserved medieval glasswork
In 1977 Erwitt lugged a 16 mm Bolex camera, a collapsible tripod and three rolls of reversal film to Herat in western Afghanistan. His goal was to document artisans who still used wood-fired furnaces and medieval molds to blow turquoise glass. The resulting documentary, The Glassmakers of Herat, screened once on PBS then disappeared until archivists digitized it decades later. The footage now serves historians as one of the few visual accounts of the craft before Soviet invasion and war scattered the workshops. Erwitt rarely mentioned the film, perhaps because it lacked the punch line of his dog pictures, but it embodied his broader curiosity about vanishing traditions.
10. One roll a day, like fishing
Despite traveling constantly Erwitt exposed film sparingly. He likened photography to angling: some days you haul in a marlin, others you stare at ripples until dusk. On assignment in Rome or Rio he might return to the hotel with twelve or fifteen frames. This discipline paid dividends when he assembled over eighty photo books. Editing sessions rarely devolved into sorting thousands of near-identical shots; instead he reviewed compact strips where each image differed markedly from the next. The method also kept his wit fresh because the shutter only clicked when something genuinely amused him.
Bonus curiosity: reluctant president of Magnum Photos
Erwitt served three separate terms as president of the cooperative agency during the 1960s. He accepted the role out of duty to protect colleagues’ copyright and fees but regarded the boardroom as a necessary toll booth. Meetings bored him; between votes he slipped outside to photograph passersby on Fifth Avenue. His tenure left the agency on sound financial footing yet he still refers to bureaucracy as the price he paid for creative liberty.
Elliott Erwitt’s career spans the arrival of television, the golden age of picture magazines, the birth of color offset printing, the death and rebirth of instant film and the ubiquity of phone cameras. Through every technological leap he has remained unfazed, confident that humor, patience and a good pair of shoes matter more than megapixels. The ten anecdotes above reveal an artist who married rigor to mischief, who could mop floors one night and serenade gallery crowds the next, who spoofed art world excess while quietly preserving endangered crafts. In a media landscape that churns faster each year his photographs continue to pause viewers, coax a smile and smuggle deeper questions about power, vanity and the thrill of simply being alive. That staying power suggests the ultimate Erwitt curiosity: the secret ingredient is not dogs, Tri-X or a double camera strap. It is the conviction that comedy can be as precise an instrument of truth as any telephoto lens.
