PhotoPlus Event: Elliott Erwitt and Alec Soth

Elliott Erwitt and Alec Soth, two great photographers widely separated by their vision, style, and generations--but sharing a sense of irony, self-effacing wit, and a photo agency (Magnum)—took the stage at New York’s Javits Center last night to talk to a packed audience about their work and careers.

Prompted by the moderator Harald Johnson and a projection of some of his most iconic images, Erwitt spoke first, offering a brief, matter-of-fact accounting of his career and work, which he peppered with one-liners.

Erwitt is a keen observer of people and dogs, and the absurd things they do. He also has a sharp comic sense of visual timing and juxtaposition. All of that was on display in his slideshow. Describing one image of a dog in jumping straight upwards, Erwitt said, “People ask, Why is he jumping?’ It’s because I barked. I bark at dogs, they jump.”

“I like dogs,” he added. “They make very good subjects and they don’t ask for prints.”

In a slightly more serious tone, he explained that dogs make good subjects because they’re sympathetic animals. “A good picture can be of anything as long as it has a kind of human connotation. In my view, [dogs] are people with more hair.”

Showing the famous image he shot for the New York Times of the two dogs standing next to a woman’s booted feet, Erwitt was reminded of another job he shot for the Times. That one involved a model and a monkey, and the monkey was suppose to “ape the pose of the model,” he explained.

“I got 350 a day, and the monkey got 500,” Erwitt deadpanned.

Among his images of people were a bride and groom that he photographed in Siberia in the 1950s for Holiday magazine. They are sitting in chairs against a wall, shrinking back in shock from a man, sitting two chairs away, who has the look of a bad boy laughing at his own bawdy joke.

“It’s a picture I give to friends of mine when they either get married or divorced,” Erwitt said.

The slideshow included several of his memorable images of museum patrons—for instance, the one of a lone woman examining Goya’s clothed Maja at the Prado Museum in Madrid, with a crowd of men studying the adjacent naked Maja.

But Erwitt is capable of serious images as well. Among those he projected was a tender photograph of his wife with their baby daughter lying on a bed, lit by window light; another image from the 1950s shows Robert Frank and his then-wife Mary stealing a private moment in the kitchen of a shabby apartment in Valencia, Spain.

Johnson asked Erwitt how he handles the relationship between photographer and subject. Never one for ponderous analysis, Erwitt said, “For me, photography is simply a matter of observing things and snapping them.” With many of his best images, he explained in response to a later question from the audience, “I just happened to see it.” On the process of publishing books, he said, “The way the [first] book was put together is what fits with what, and that’s just a matter of instinct.” And when asked about shooting digital versus film, Erwitt says he shoots digital for commercial work because clients prefer it, but he continues to shoot film for his personal work. “I’ve been photographing in Italy with film since the ‘50s, and I don’t see any reason to change,” he said.

Betraying some anger and bitterness, Erwitt told the audience that he’s “had a lot of trouble” with the publisher of Personal Exposures, his 1988 book. To those contemplating publishing deals for their own books, he advised, “Get a copyright lawyer, or they [publishers] screw you otherwise.”

But his presentation ended on a positive note. He continues to shoot, and has been traveling to Rome, where he grew up, to work on a book that is due out next year. Asked what his advice is for aspiring photographers, Erwitt said, “It’s a hard road right now, with so many people, and less opportunity. My best advice is to be an heir, and failing that, to take pictures because it’s great fun to do so, and with digital it’s not that expensive. And have a day job and have a wonderful hobby. Photography is just a great way to spend time.”

Then it was Soth’s turn. “Elliott’s advice was the advice I was following. It seemed impossible to make a career as a photographer,” he said. So Soth (rhymes with “oath”) took a job in an art museum, and used his vacation time over the course of several years to pursue a personal project photographing along the Mississippi. That turned into his monograph, Sleeping by the Mississippi, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Later, in response to a question about his transition from obscure museum employee to famous photographer, Soth said, “I got lucky, it all happened at once. This may be a Midwestern sensibility, but I’m always waiting for it to end.” His backup plan is to be a working photographer, which he is putting into practice by taking editorial assignments. 

At one point, Johnson warned Soth a loaded question was coming, and then asked how he “manages to be an important artist without being in New York.”

“What a snobby question!” Soth said in good humor. Then he described how he manages well enough; clients from New York call, figuring they can save money by hiring him for jobs they need shot in Montana. “They think Montana is right next door. Minnesota, Montana. They both start with M, right?”

Showing images from his various projects, Soth explained that for him, “the joy of photography was this solitary process,” then he later said in response to a question from an audience member about his Niagara project that the medium “drives me crazy sometimes—it’s fragmentary nature, it’s inability to tell a full story.” (Hence the inclusion of some of his subjects’ love letters in his book Niagara).

Asked about his relationships with subjects, Soth said he’s not one to spend a month living with his subject in order to get to know them. “My interactions are very often fleeting, and quite solitary,” he said. “When I make a portrait of someone, it’s not so much [about] revealing them, but making a portrait of the space between us.” A case in point is Soth’s image of a man holding two model airplanes, which has become an iconic image of his Sleeping by the Mississippi project.

 Asked later in the program by an audience member how he finds his subjects, Soth said, “Not long before that project [SBM] I was painfully shy. Maybe my biggest fear was being on stage with Elliott Erwitt.  So photographing people was therapy. I started by photographing kids in a park…The way to find people and simultaneously deal with my nervousness was got to a bar. So that’s your tip. Drink more.”

Coming of age in the pre-internet days, Soth’s access to photography was through bookstores. “My biggest ambition was to produce books,” he said. With his SBM work, he explained, “I decided to just make my own book.” He hand-made 25 copies, and once word got around, he found a publisher and has produced three editions.

Soth is now focusing on exhibitions, and made his process of producing books and mounting exhibitions sounds more deliberative and less intuitive than Erwitt’s (though it may or may not be, and the results are what count in any case). For books, Soth labors over maquettes—a model of the book with work prints glued to the pages, so he can get a sense of turning them, and see how one photo relates to the next. (Soth described how at Magnum meetings photographers sometimes struggle to pay attention to the business at hand, so there’s a lot of maquette exchange and critique taking place around the sidelines). For exhibits, he first builds a scale model of the space, and prints postage stamp-sized versions of his images that he can easily re-arrange on the walls of the model.

Soth’s more recently published projects include Dog Days Bogota, which he photographed over the course of two months while he and his wife were in Colombia to adopt their daughter. That project was inspired by his effort to understand the place of his daughter’s origin, he said. He ended up photographing the street dogs, he explained, as a stand-in for the street children of Bogota, which he felt uncomfortable photographing for ethical reasons.

Meanwhile, Soth talked about a current project called The Last Days of W. (as in George W. Bush). That title appears as a gothic headline on a ‘zine that Soth has produced on newsprint. “I wanted to mark the end of this time, as you often do with a headline. It’s not politically motivated, but it is a requiem for these last eight years.”

Digital printers have opened up the possibilities for photographers, he noted with genuine enthusiasm and not as a plug for the program’s sponsor (HP). “Now there’s the opportunity for you to become your own magazine, your own publisher,” he said, suggesting that SBM would be a much easier project to self-publish now. A propos of the wonders of modern printing technology, Soth noted, “There are shooting photographers and there are darkroom photographers. I’m much more on the shooting side. That’s my love. The printing side has always been a means to an end.”

When the floor was finally opened to audience questions, there came some tedious questions about copyright, model releases, and property rights. One person asked Erwitt whether he had a property release for the Eiffel Tower, which appears in the background of one of his well-known images of a man leaping.

“No,” he said. “You can’t go around being afraid of everything, for chrissake.”

A brief cheer from the audience didn’t dissuade someone else from asking Soth about his use of model releases. He took it in good humor, saying he asks every subject to sign a release, but he’s cut his release form to one sentence so it doesn’t scare people. That probably makes his release worthless as a legal document, he said, but at least it’s a way of getting everyone’s address so he can send them prints. That’s time consuming work that piles up, he says, “but it’s really good karma to do it.”

The photographers were also asked how rejection has shaped their careers. Slightly perplexed by the question, Erwitt said, “Rejection is not a good thing. It makes you sad.” Then he added, “Once a dog peed on my leg.”

Finally, asked about any unmet goals they have, Erwitt said, “No, I’m perfectly happy doing what I’m doing,” though he allowed how he needs to get out and take new pictures, now that he’s just about exhausted the book possibilities of his archive.

Soth’s response? “I still want to make a great book.”