Man Bites Dog
From The New York Times:
Life on a Banana Peel: Elliott Erwitt's View of an Absurd Cosmos
By VICKI GOLDBERG
Published: December 14, 2003
If you need a smile during the holidays, drop in on "Elliott Erwitt: Leica Lifetime Achievement Award 2003," through Jan. 3 at the Leica Gallery on Broadway and Bond Street. Over the years Mr. Erwitt has produced a passel of photographs to smile at (and, for ballast, some to be very serious about). He recently turned 75 and still packs a grin in his camera bag and carries it around. He attended the opening of his 60-work show in a Japanese traffic policeman's vest lighted up brighter than a Christmas tree. He sometimes answers the telephone saying simply "Speaking."
His photographs include a picture of a rather prim Nicaraguan woman seen piecemeal through a row of shelves upon which sit two globular pieces of fruit about where her breasts must be. Then there's a nude couple viewed from behind as they walk though the woods, he wearing a top hat and she a bridal veil. Another couple, newlywed in 1958, sits by a sign on their car that reads, "She got me this morning but I'll get her tonight."
Mr. Erwitt has repeatedly put the 35-millimeter camera to one of its more refined uses: to snatch from the flux of common disorder the perfectly ordered absurdities, incongruities and coincidences that chance randomly doles out. The S-curve of a heron's neck comments disparagingly on the angle of an outdoor faucet. The sculpture of a nude woman poised on one foot on a high turret with arms outstretched appears to balance the visible half of the moon atop her head. The sculpture may in fact be Diana, goddess of the moon, who sometimes wears a crescent moon in her hair; but here she is jointly crowned by the moment and the photographer.
Mr. Erwitt's many canine friends one of his books is called "Son of Bitch,"another "To the Dogs" have all eaten a diet of funny bones. A bulldog sits upright on a man's lap, imperiously replacing the man's head with his own. A woman's boots are flanked by a dog the size of a starved rat on one side and the giraffelike legs of a giant dog on the other.
Spoken jokes may be conversation stoppers, but photographic puns and amusements start your mind talking things over, sometimes by implying a narrative that begs to be carried on, sometimes provoking a "how did he get that?" or "was that a setup?" or "who are those people?" and sometimes just in savoring the satisfaction, no laughing matter, of knowing that life provides minor joys free no work, no planning necessary.
Fortune occasionally, generously, interrupts the general daily monotony with wry comments and ridiculous juxtapositions; the invention of photography, aided by fast cameras and quick-witted photographers, made possible the spread of these small delights to more than a handful of witnesses. When Henry Luce started Life in 1936, he thought that photography would counter the dismal tendency of the news, but the medium crashed over that idea and left it by the side of the road. Most of the photographs that lodge in memory or that are candidates for a list of greatest photographs of the last century are pictures of war, assassination, disaster or the aftermath of horror.
It is no great surprise, then, that Mr. Erwitt's shutter finger, quick enough to catch a chuckle floating by on the wind, also knows how to arrest the news as it blows past. In North Carolina in 1950 he photographed a black man drinking from a fountain that said "colored" next to a fountain that said "white." In a wrenching picture of Jacqueline Kennedy holding a folded flag at her husband's funeral, the anguish on her face fairly cries out through her black veil.
Then there is the world-famous picture of the "kitchen debate" in 1959 between Nikita Khrushchev and Vice President Richard M. Nixon, which Mr. Erwitt caught at the moment Nixon jabbed his finger at the impassive Khrushchev's chest. The image bolstered Nixon's standing as a forceful opponent of Communism and was used in his campaign literature in his run for the presidency, much to the chagrin of Mr. Erwitt, who was no fan of Nixon.
Even though his viewfinder tends to be rose colored more often than not, Mr. Erwitt can obviously change lenses at will and register shades of feeling on black-and-white film. There's belligerence (two men under a New York elevated railway having a fistfight that hasn't yet knocked off their hats), tenderness (a couple dancing in a kitchen not identified, but in fact the young Mary and Robert Frank, the artist and the photographer, in 1952), ecstatic love (an embracing couple seen in the side mirror of a car, the woman's face lighted up with a million watts of happiness).
Still, Mr. Erwitt is most at home balancing on the sharp edge of wit, where his uncommonly quick connection between eye, brain and hand consistently catches the world slipping on a banana peel. The kinds of pleasantries he serves up are a momentary antidote to the news, temporarily reviving Luce's moribund notion that consuming on-the-spot photography might be good for the digestion.
His photographic outlook presupposes a state of grace in which the laughs outnumber the snarls and let us forget our troubles for a while. In the aggregate, his pictures testify that though we may not acknowledge it, we inhabit a world that is more agreeable, and funnier, than we have any right to expect either from photography or life.
Posted by cronish at December 14, 2003 02:39 PM