One man and his Leica: An audience with enigmatic Magnum photographer Elliott Erwitt.

One man and his Leica: An audience with enigmatic Magnum photographer Elliott Erwitt.
Elliott Erwitt is on PR duty at the Frankfurt Book Fair. He stands, somewhat awkwardly, as a phalanx of German photographers with large lenses take his picture. They probably think they're taking a decent portrait. But they don't see that under the sober tweed jacket, there is a pair of Stars and Stripes braces. Nor will they guess that Elliott Erwitt, veteran of worldfamous Magnum photo agency, almost certainly finds their whirring and flashing ridiculous. He looks over to where I am skulking by the book-piles, and grins.

Erwitt has a reputation for quietness. A journalist once wanted to write 12,000 words on the man, and a fellow photographer said, "In all the years I've spoken to him, Elliott hasn't spoken 12,000 words." Actually, he speaks easily. He smiles and twinkles. He is one of the few people who can treat an interview as a conversation. Which is how I know about the braces – "my small patriotic gesture". And how I know, though his gentlemanly courtesy prevents him from speaking ill of most things, that he has an antipathy to paraphernalia. "Photography is very simple," he says. "People make it so technical, so complicated, to disguise the fact. They overcompensate."

This would surprise the Nikon-carriers: Erwitt's forty-year career has included plenty of commercial work – for the French tourist board, for Italian fashion houses, for airlines and big business – where he has happily used the assistant, the filters, the whole ostentatious, complicated baggage of the modern photographer.

But it is another Elliot whose work he is promoting here in the 500-picture collection Snaps. The anti-Elliott – his work was once called "anti-photos" – shoots only in black and white, usually takes one shot only, is never without a Leica in his pocket, and will wait hours for one snap. This Erwitt says, "I observe, I try to entertain, but above all, I want pictures that are emotional." This Erwitt finds people who ask what film he uses hilarious – he uses what's in his bag ?– and people who ask how hard it is to use colour ("you just put a colour film in the camera") funnier still. And for apparently simple snaps that can contain fathoms of emotional input, the anti-Elliott is peerless.

Yet his name is probably unknown to most. If anything, he's a taker of funny pictures with easy charm, or a photographic dog-lover: His Dog Dogs book has sold 250,000 copies. A professional photographer will know him as a master of inimitably perfect composition and deceptive casualness. To the true fan, he has an eye for a shot like no other, and his work has the pathos and insight of Cartier-Bresson and the charm of Doisneau, though he has the name-droppability of neither. Hence Snaps. "Books aren't very rumunerative," he muses over bad German food. "But you get jobs out of it and that leads to work." His face – soulful and doleful, like Matthau without the jowls – creases into irony. "Besides, I have to do it – I've been around so long, most editors think I'm dead."

He was born in Paris in 1928, to a Russian Jew called Boris, and a Russian Greek Orthodox mother called Evgenia. It was textbook romantic: Evgenia had been one of the richest girls in Moscow, but lost everything in the Revolution. Boris was a dilettante from Odessa. Almost immediately, they moved to Italy, and Elio Romano Erwitz – his middle name a homage to the Holy City – grew up speaking Italian in public, Russian at home. But Mussolini forced the family out, and in 1939 they took the last peacetime ship from France, landing in New York to a world five days into war. Later, Boris took his child to the West Coast, and the marriage broke down. By then Elio Erwitz had become Elliott Erwitt, easier for American mouths to pronounce, and he had begun to live in a fourth language.

The instability chased him into adulthood: Four wives – "none beheaded" – six children, five grandchildren. He met his current wife, German zweedheart Pia, when she came to interview him. He doesn't say much about the others, except that they were beautiful and smart, and that his love of America's southern states dimmed after his marriage – number three – to a Southerner. When I say his private life could be called chaotic, he replies, "Well, what do you mean? Changing countries I suppose was chaotic. Changing cities. Living on your own at an early age. I've married a few times." He pauses. "Is that chaos? Perhaps it's just activity."

He began being properly active aged 16, after his father left for New Orleans, fleeing alimony payments. Elliott, left alone in Southern California, took up photography as "a way to buy biscuits". He worked first as a darkroom assistant, printing movie stars' pictures other people had taken. Soon, he bought a Rolleiflex and started taking his own, beginning with pictures of his dentist. Then, "Henri Cartier Bresson's picture of a train depot jumped out at me. I had never reacted to a photo like that before – the mood, the tight rectangular composition, the casualness of it. It was a scene available to anyone. You didn't need anything special except your own personal equipment for noticing things. It was a revelation." As was the black and white. He still refuses to use colour in his non-commercial work. "Colour film is more about narrative and storytelling. Photographs are a synthesis. My photographs are more of a drawing than a painting." (Sometimes he uses the byline Snaps Pikazo.)

"In a good photograph, the essentials are there and you don't need all the other stuff." Certainly none of those computer things: Photography should be observation, not manipulation, he says – he loathes Photoshop, and prefers not to crop, because a good photograph is perfectly framed in the first place. Even so, writes Charles Flowers, a writer and ghostwriter who provides the text in Snaps, "for all of his devotion to chance, he meets each snap at least halfway." Elliott thinks waiting for pictures is a kind of manipulation, but he's also not above tweaking: For a museum picture of men looking at a female nude, next to a woman looking at a female clothed, he "moved them around a bit." And those famous jumping dogs? He barks, they jump. Snap.

He moved to New York in 1946, and introduced himself to three photographic greats: Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art, Rod Stryker and Robert Capa, "who was running this little agency I'd never heard of." All thought the work of the man who "just takes pictures" exceptional. He signed up for the Army in 1951 and for Magnum - Capa's agency - two years later. Since then, the commercial and the "hobby" – as he refers to the award-winning body of work – have co-existed harmoniously, taking it in turns to fund each other, and doing it well: the Erwitts live between New York and the Hamptons, each home bearing two life-size plaster Japanese policemen at the entrance.

Erwitt sees comedy in most things, and then some more, because he's watching and waiting for it: A gull and aeroplane with parallel lines, each one's form mirroring the other, a woman's jutting bosom aping her dog's pedigree snout. As a wedding present, he often gives a scene from a Siberian registry office, where two newlyweds gaze at a smirking James Dean figure lounging in the chair next to them. Elliott thinks it's funny, but also that it says much about the uncertainties of marriage. "Some people think my pictures are sad, some think they're funny," he wrote in the 1998 collection Personal Exposures. "Funny and sad, aren't they really the same thing? They add up to normality." If there is comedy in his work, it's also the human, divine kind.

Not that he won't supply the funny anecdotes of a 50-year veteran: The Shah of Iran wore platform heels ("You could tell from the pant creases"). Che Guevara was good-looking but not charming, Marilyn Monroe the opposite. One notorious image – the "kitchen debate" of Richard Nixon and Nikita Kruschev arguing at a Westinghouse exhibit – almost didn't happen because he was laughing too hard: Kruschev told Nixon to "Go screw my grandmother" in Russian, which the child of Boris and Evgenia understood perfectly.

There are no captions in Snaps, beyond place and date, because a good photograph shouldn't need one. There are chapter headings, supposed to reflect life's natural compartments – Look, Tell, Stand, Move, Rest – but they were the designer's idea. The reason he is most proud of the opening photograph – a black man drinking at a fountain marked "colored" – is because "it tells you the whole business. It's very economical, very obvious, very sharp." But because Elliott doesn't bother trying to explain his pictures (he thinks curators write in "museumese"), he can be surprised by what they tell people. He describes the water fountain shot as "a very violent image," but Flowers found it funny. "Elliott was horrified. But I had been there, a boy in the South who was surprised and disappointed when the Colored fountain in the downtown dry-goods store shot up water that was perfectly clear rather than hued like a rainbow."

"I guess if you take a picture and you want to have a certain meaning," Erwitt now reflects, "and people get that meaning, that's nice. Otherwise people can like my photos on any level and I'm happy."

Some don't, of course. He has been accused of whimsy, old-fashioned sweetness, irrelevance. In 1998, a reviewer wrote, "there is a price to be paid for this popular charm, so light on the eye, so hard to achieve. All those years with Magnum, and Elliott Erwitt is better known for a single shot of a bug-eyed Chihuahua than for any reportage from the great plains of human history." No longer. "Treasure this collection," writes Elliot's friend Murray Sayle in the introduction to Snaps. "It's destined to become a classic, because the times and technologies that made it possible will never come again." The sharp-eyed man has finally delivered a panoramic of those great plains of history. And the dot on the horizon, Leica in hand? That'll be Elliott.

Published in the Independent on Sunday Review
21/10/2001