The way Elliott Erwitt told it, pointing his camera and taking prizewinning pictures was the easiest job in the world. “Photography is pretty simple stuff,” he said. “You react to what you see and take pictures.”
Although his work was exhibited in the world’s most prestigious galleries, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, taking pictures was “a lazy man’s profession” that required only “modest ability” and plenty of “luck”.
When asked in a 2015 interview by the journalist Nigel Farndale about any of his famous images, he replied: “It’s a nice picture. I don’t know what else there is to say about it.” A good photograph was “a gift that should not be analysed” and