Elliott Erwitt – 100 photos for Press Freedom

Powerful and explosive images, some of which instantly acquired the status of icons of modern photography: Robert Doisneau said of Elliott Erwitt that he had «graphic humor, lively as a wink». Editor Robert Delpire added that his photos had the effect of «powerful aphorisms».

During his very long career – 600,000 negatives on the counter -, Elliott Erwitt approached with the same sparkling and sensitive eye many themes, bringing them together in as many books: couples (Between the Sexes, 1994), children (Kids, 2012) and dogs, obviously, to which he devoted no less than five monographs (Son of Bitch in 1974, To the Dogs in 1992, Dog Dogs in 1998, Woof in 2005, Elliott Erwitt’s Dogs in 2008)): “I photograph dogs a lot because I love them, because they don’t refuse to be photographed and because they don’t ask for prints.”

The portfolio of a hundred pages opens with a foreword by the historian of photography Pauline Vermare. It is illuminated by unpublished texts: a fountain story by Tania de Montaigne; the fraternal greeting of photographer William Wegman; the unpublished parallel with photographer Sabine Weiss by Marie Desplechin; nudity as a remedy for morosity by Sophie Fontanel; the dialogue between two Japanese dogs by Dorothée de Monfreid.