Elliott Erwitt: Home Around the World offers a timely and critical reconsideration of Erwitt’s unparalleled life as a photographer. Produced alongside a major retrospective exhibition, the book features examples of Erwitt’s early experiments in California, his intimate family portraits in New York, his major magazine assignments and long-term documentary interests, and his ongoing personal investigations of public spaces and their transitory inhabitants. Essays by photography experts based on extensive new interviews with the photographer consider less-studied aspects of Erwitt’s work: his engagement with social and political issues through photojournalism, the humanist qualities of his very early photographs, and his work as a filmmaker. Home Around the World traces the development and refinement of Erwitt’s unique visual approach over time. With over two hundred photographs, and ephemera including magazine reproductions, advertisements, and contact sheets, this volume is the first to offer a comprehensive historical treatment of Erwitt’s body of work and position in the field.
Elliott Erwitt (born in Paris, 1928) moved to New York City in 1950. He has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1953, and served as its president for three years in the 1960s. Erwitt has published dozens of books and his photographs have been featured in publications around the world for over sixty years. He has also directed multiple films and countless photographic and cinematic projects. Balancing journalistic, commercial, and artistic work over a remarkably productive career spanning seven decades, Erwitt has created some of the most celebrated photographs of the past century.
Jessica S. McDonald (editor and texts) is the chief curator of photography at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. McDonald received an Ansel Adams Research Fellowship from the Center for Creative Photography in 2011. Previously, she worked as assistant curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she curated the exhibition Photography in Mexico: Selected Works from the Collections of SFMOMA and Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser.
Stuart Alexander (text) is an independent curator and photo historian based in New York. Recognized as an expert on Post War photography, he has worked with major international institutions on numerous books and exhibitions on such subjects as Robert Frank, Louis Faurer, Josef Koudelka and Magnum Photos.
Sean Corcoran (text) is curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York and an established essayist. His previously published essays include “The City as Canvas: Graffiti Art from the Martin Wong Collection” (2013) and a piece written for Aperture’s 2014 title Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao: New York.
Steven Hoelscher (text) is the chair of the Department of American Studies at University of Texas at Austin, where he focuses on Photography, Cultural and Historical Geography; Urban Studies; Memory; Ethnicity and Race. In 2013, he authored A Reading Magnum: A Visual Archive of the Modern World (University of Texas Press).