Elliott Erwitt: When photography tells the world in a light-hearted way

A tiny dog next to long legs. A man sitting with the head of a bulldog. There's nothing more serious than humour, and Elliott Erwitt understood this before anyone else. His photographs, often funny, sometimes poignant, always intelligent, tell simple, universal stories that seduce us, irresistibly. In the documentary Silence Sounds Good, director Adriana López Sanfeliu opens the door to the intimate world of this master of duality, where lightness and gravity coexist with a certain elegance.

Elliott Erwitt is an American photographer born in Paris in 1928 to Russian-Jewish emigrant parents. He spent his childhood in Italy, which he fled at the age of 10 to France to escape Mussolini. Then, in 1939, his parents emigrated again to the United States, to New York, before settling in Los Angeles.

In Erwitt's world, it's all a question of looking. With his characteristic spontaneity of analysis, he detects something as human as comical in an everyday scene. A matron observes the world behind shelves where two squashes, placed there by chance, seem to lend her an imaginary anatomy. Dogs, caught at unlikely angles, become funny and moving reflections of their masters.

Beneath this light surface, however, there is a sharp eye, a meticulous attention to the absurd and to the details that betray our condition. As Erwitt himself puts it, with false casualness: I'm very serious about not being serious. With him, irony is never an escape or a mask, but a way of asking the real questions without weighing down the subject.

AN UNSPOILT EYE, INFINITE PATIENCE

Adriana López Sanfeliu's documentary captures this approach with palpable tenderness. For several years, she worked as an assistant to this man who, at over 90, continues to search for ‘the next image’. The documentary follows him on this tireless quest, particularly on his return to Cuba, where he was invited fifty years after his famous post-revolutionary shots. In 1964, Elliott Erwitt spent a week as Fidel Castro's guest in Cuba. Newsweek magazine commissioned him to photograph the ‘líder máximo’ in the company of Che Guevara, the emblematic figure of the Cuban revolution.

More than 50 years later, with the normalisation of relations between Cuba and the United States, Erwitt returned to the island to produce a photographic report on the cities and landscapes, capturing an era and a country in constant evolution. Age has slowed his body, but not his spirit. Each shot is a lesson in patience and precision, each scene a pretext for telling a story without words.

Erwitt has photographed the powerful - presidents, popes, film stars - and the anonymous. He does not seek to explain, still less to judge. He captures what is. Elliott Erwitt may be a man of his century, but his photographs transcend time. They speak of the paradoxes of humanity: the fragility of relationships, the beauty of fleeting moments, the absurdity of convention. This universality is based on his refusal to take himself too seriously. ‘Thinking too much in photography is never a good idea,’ he says. For him, instinct takes precedence over analysis, the eye over the concept.

It is from this simplicity that Adriana López Sanfeliu builds her film. Silence Sounds Good is a modest tribute, where words give way to gestures and glances. It shows a man who prefers to talk about others rather than himself, and for whom photography is a far more eloquent language than any conversation.

The title, chosen by Erwitt himself, reflects this modesty. Adriana López Sanfeliu avoids the trap of heavy-handed homage or didacticism. She follows her mentor and friend with a discreet camera, attentive to his daily life. Her gaze goes beyond the artist at work: she also reveals the manbehind the lens: his precise gestures, his biting humour, and his almost childlike attachment to dogs, which appear as faithful companions in his work and in his life.

One of the moments in the film - probably one of the most poignant - shows Erwitt silently rediscovering prints from the early days of his career. At the age of 22, in 1950, he was immortalising Pittsburgh, a city in the throes of change, moving from the industrial era to that of a modern metropolis.

Adriana López Sanfeliu films this suspended moment, this implicit dialogue between two periods in his life, with remarkable sensitivity. Without recourse to words, she lets the images tell the story of time passing and creativity enduring. This silence is perhaps the key to Erwitt's work: a space where the image speaks for itself, where the most fragile and universal aspects of the human being are revealed.

The photos are taken from the film Elliott Erwitt, Silence Sounds Good
directed in 2019 par Adriana Lopez Sanfeliu
co-written by Adriana Lopez Sanfeliu and Mark Monroe
produced by Caméra Lucida Productions and Adriana Lopez Sanfeliu
international sales : CLPB Rights
© Camera lucida productions / Adriana Lopez Sanfeliu / 2019