Elliott Erwitt – Last Laughs – PhotoBook Journal

Review by Lee Halvorsen •

This book is a treasure chest of smiles for the reader, all the fun types of smiles…broad, subtle, ironic, wistful, melancholy, and more! The images embrace the reader’s psyche with comfort and humor, warmth and song, humanity and the sense of being human. The images are stunning and well composed but very, very much more than that.

Erwitt curated the images in this book shortly before his death in 2023. His image choices, their sequencing, the individual power of each image create a warm, secure connection with him…how he saw the ordinary as something special, how he saw the world with a twinkle in his eye directly connected to his shutter finger.

The book is called a “coffee table” book and indeed, at almost 11×14 inches and five pounds, its size and weight fully meet that expectation. And, well…this book should be on your coffee table…your guests will look, pick it up, sit down and open it to Erwitt’s view of mankind! You will probably lose them for a bit, you’ll see them grin, then you’ll hear a chuckle as they turn the book so you can see the image that made them smile.

Erwitt chose images for the “Last Laugh” that were taken in the 1950s through the 2000s. Many of them cover a single two page spread, others were carefully paired to show how a sense of humor can also prevail after the shutter, during the curation process. Each page turn was as a curtain opening to a classic movie; I imagined the movement, life, and emotion in each image and spread…and enjoyed my view through Erwitt’s lens of humor.

I imagine Erwitt walked slowly, seeing the normal day-to-day flow of humanity but looking for that one little bit of irony, metaphor, smile, craziness and then he’d snap. Marilyn Monroe with her skirt blowing up, a group of adults standing on a park bench next to a sign that says, “LOST PERSONS AREA,” or a family/group portrait with just a tinge of more than fun.

Life happens fast but Erwitt was ready…he knew in the “fast” there’d be a moment of fun. For instance, a slot machine with the features of a cowboy, the handle as an arm with a pistol pointing towards the player beautifully captured as a woman carefully pulls the barrel of the revolver towards her chest. A nudist camp with a man facing away from the camera, one hand behind his back holding two tennis balls. A giant poodle standing at the fence of a dog show ring…

Erwitt often caught bits of humor in a single image…for instance, an old steam locomotive racing along a barren prairie just a short distance from a car racing along a parallel road. Or the flock of geese walking parallel to a “flock” of costumed schoolgirls in communist Hungary. His love for something special enabled him to pair images making the two a greater single experience.

Erwitt liked dogs and years ago made several photo books on dogs. This volume also includes humorous looks at dogs, people and their dogs, and dogs and their dogs. Dogs with goggles, dogs obscuring their humans, dogs looking like their humans…dogs. There are not a huge number of dogs, but they sneak up on you when you open the some of the curtains.

The excellent foreword by Graydon Carter and Nathan King provides insight into how Erwitt thought and shot. They tell us Erwitt always had his personal camera on his left shoulder and his professional camera on his right and most of his best photos came from the left shoulder. They say Erwitt “…had a preternatural gift for homing in on the borderline between the everyday and the absurd,..”. Erwitt treated that “border” as something soft, something in the eye of the beholder as well as his.

This book is a must have, a physical object fitting the coffee table and ready to fill your mind with smiles, complex images, and Erwitt’s very human view into how we live.

Lee Halvorsen is assistant editor, writer and visual artist living in Virginia.

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Elliott Erwitt — Last Laughs

Artist: Elliott Erwitt, passed away in 2023

Foreword: Graydon Carter & Nathan King

Publisher: teNeues Publishing Group, Augsburg, Germany

Website for teNeues and this book.

Printed by teNeues Verlag GmbH

Book design, David Griffin

Language: German, English, Italian and French

Hardback, 208 pages, stitched binding, 120 tritone images, 27,5 x 34 cm, ISBN 978-3-96171-633-3

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