The New York photographer Elliott Erwitt, who died on 29 November aged 95, was once asked how he got dogs to jump for his pictures. The trick, he suggested, was to speak their language. Bark at a dog, he said, and “sometimes they bark back, sometimes they jump”. Erwitt was a member of the Magnum agency for 70 years and worked on assignments around the world, taking pictures of politicians (famously of Richard Nixon poking Nikita Khrushchev in the chest in 1959) and of celebrities (Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, Jack Kerouac); even so, it was his comic affinity for canine subjects for which he was best loved.
The predeliction came as something of a surprise to him. “Most of the time,” he wrote in 1998, “when I am out of the house I carry a small unobtrusive camera and I snap away obsessively at things that interest me… I never set out to take dog pictures but somehow dogs appeared in large numbers on my contact sheets… Obviously, my sympathy for the creatures was deeper than I had imagined.” Those words came in the introduction to his third book of dog photographs, DogDogs (others included Son of Bitch and Woof). He liked the fact that “dogs made easy, uncomplaining targets without the self-conscious hang-ups and objections of humans caught on film”.
A tall man, Erwitt would make certain to get down to the pavement level to get his portraits, his subject’s domain: “I decided to photograph from a dog’s point of view because dogs see more shoes than anybody,” he said. He doubted that any other animal had a dog’s capacity for heart or loyalty. “Some people,” he pointed out, “say elephants come close – but they do not roam the streets in every town and country like dogs do.”
