A Discovery About One of Elliott Erwitt’s Most Famous Photographs

There’s one simple but important piece of advice I learned from Eric Kim upon reading David Gibson’s Street Photographer’s Manual: “buy books, not gear.”

Not long after making an investment in a Canon EOS R8 earlier this year, I realized that I had acquired more than enough gear for doing meaningful work. Rather than continue to ogle cameras and lenses online, I’ve been trying to focus more on the art of photography. And looking at books is a great way to do that.

Yesterday on my stroll around town, I stopped into a local library and browsed its collection of photography books. As I scanned what was sitting on the shelf, one book caught my eye: Elliott Erwitt: Home Around the World (2016), which was the companion book to an exhibition by the same name that ran at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Elliott Erwitt, who passed away toward the end of last year, is one of my favorite photographers. More than anything else, Erwitt’s work reminds me not to take photography so seriously that I forget to have a sense of humor.

As I paged through that collection of Erwitt’s work, I came across one of his most famous photographs, which he took in New York in 1946. Erwitt depicts a tiny dog standing next to the feet of its owner from a ground-level perspective.

I love seeing the contact sheets for celebrated images. I am always fascinated by how a photographer worked a subject to get one keeper image from a series of shots most of which were ultimately discarded. On the opposite page in the book before me was that very contact sheet.

As the writer of the text accompanying the image pointed out, Erwitt was using a twin-lens Rolliflex at the time he took this series of photographs. That particular type of camera was well suited for that early phase of Erwitt’s career. He was still a youthful photographer who was not yet comfortable taking pictures of people, and his Rolliflex’s waist-level finder helped him approach people inconspicuously. In this particular case, it also enabled him to set his camera directly on the ground for the kind of shot that would have been nearly impossible to compose with an eye-level viewfinder.

But what struck me most was how that composition, one I’ve seen time and again, was actually quite a heavy crop of the original exposure. Shooting with perhaps the one and only lens he had with him, it seems Erwitt later saw a better composition in a far tighter crop than the wider square image he captured with his Rolleiflex TLR that day. On his contact sheet, he took what appears to have been a grease pencil and marked the crop of the final image he wanted.

I thought this was an interesting counterpoint to the approach of Henri Cartier-Bresson. As Clément Chéroux wrote in his short biography on HCB (pp. 109-111), he believed that the composition he made upon the instant of making an exposure was a record of the relationship between himself and his subject. He went to great and sometimes futile lengths to deter editors who might crop his images. He even stamped “PLEASE DO NOT CROP THIS PHOTOGRAPH” on the back of many of his prints.

I tend to lean toward Henri Cartier-Bresson’s approach and crop sparingly. I usually find that, when I come across a subject to photograph and take several shots, my first exposure is usually the one I end up keeping. That initial gut decision on how to frame a subject within the confines of a 3:2 image ratio is usually the one that appears best once I’m back home having a look at my work. Making more than a minor trim feels like cutting away part of an experience as I preserved it in a photograph.

But every now and again, I do find that, for whatever reason, a heavy crop is called for. Again, it’s not something I do often, but there are times when a particular area of an exposure is the natural focus of a photograph.