Photographers with a comic outlook on life seldom win the acclaim granted to exalters of nature or chroniclers of war and squalor. Elliott Erwitt, who died at 95 on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan, was an exception.
For more than six decades he used his camera to tell visual jokes, finding material wherever he strolled. His sharp eye for silly, sometimes telling conjunctions — a dog lying on its back in a cemetery, a glowing Coca-Cola machine amid a public display of missiles in Alabama, a mangy potted plant in a tacky Miami Beach ballroom — earned him constant assignments as well as the affection of a public that shared his sweet, Chaplin-esque sense of the absurd.
He published more than 20 books, and his black-and-white prints are in photography collections throughout the world. His daughter Sasha Erwitt confirmed the death.
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