MiamiPhotoFest and OstLicht Gallery for Photography, 
Vienna Presents

“PARIS”

Elliott Erwitt

MiamiPhotoFest and OstLicht. Gallery for Photography, 
Vienna present works by Elliott Erwitt, legendary photographer, longtime Magnum-member and master of the subtle art of wit.

© elliott erwitt | MAGNUM PHOTOS

Elliott Erwitt’s “PARIS”

An Erwitt photo is recognizable among hundreds of others. His work is characterized by sharp, but always warm-hearted humor that stands out in the history of the medium. Erwitt’s pictures seem to constantly wink at us, they make us accomplices or point us to our vanities.

This distinctive view on things marks both Erwitt’s commissioned works and his more personal projects. It provides a human scale in Erwitt’s political stories and adds a profoundness to his everyday observations which goes far beyond the captured moment.

Erwitt looks at Paris with the eyes of a flaneur. His Paris is the city of boulevards and cafés, of jardins and cabarets. He thus adds to the metropolis’ myth, but thanks to his inimitable sense for the particularities of the everyday we feel like walking through the city for the very first time.

The exhibition set encompasses photographs from a period of no less than seven decades and is thus as much an ode to the so called City of Love as it is a representation of the impressive lifework of one of the major photographers of our time.

Elliott Erwitt’s “PARIS” - Silver Gelatin prints, signed by the artist and framed in wooden frame designed by Chanel.

“Paris” will be on display at MiamiPhotoFest 2019 - Feb 27th - Mar 3rd.

Opening night RSVP, Limited Availability

All Prints are signed and available for sale during this event.

Elliott Erwitt’s “PARIS” is produced by Florida Photographic Foundation and supported by OstLicht. Gallery for Photography, Vienna

Son of Russian emigrants, Elliott Erwitt was born in 1928 in Paris and grew up in Milan. In 1939 in the face of National Socialism his family immigrated to New York City, then moved to Los Angeles in 1941. In Hollywood 15-years-old Erwitt found his first position in a commercial photo studio, where he developed contact sheets of stars and starlets of the movie industry. In 1946 Erwitt moved back to the East Coast – New York has been his home base ever since. Here he met Robert Capa; Edward Steichen and Roy Stryker gave him his first assignments. Towards the end of the 1940s he spent a year traveling France and Italy. The earliest photographs in this exhibition were taken on this trip. Drafted into the army in 1951, he got a position as a dark room assistant in a messaging unit stationed in Germany and France. After his release from the military, Robert Capa recruited the young photographer for Magnum Photos. A member of the prestigious agency ever since, he also served as Magnum’s president for three years in the 1960s. Erwitt worked for all the big names of the Golden Age of photojournalism, among them Look, Life, Collier’s and Holiday, to name only a few. Journalistic assignments alternated with commercial work, but he always took the time for his more personal photographs – his “snap shots” as he likes to call them. During the 1970s he increasingly turned to the moving image and produced several documentaries as well as a series of comedies for US television channel HBO in the 1980s. His work is represented in renowned collections around the globe; one-man exhibitions have been hosted by institutions such as MoMA New York, the Smithsonian, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Kunsthaus Zurich.