New Shows at ICP Worth the Wait

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.

Susan Sontag, On Photography

Elliott Erwitt, New York, 1974. © Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

Elliott Erwitt, North Carolina, 1950. © Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

Elliott Erwitt, Jacqueline Kennedy at John F. Kennedy’s funeral, Arlington, Virginia, November 25, 1963. © Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

The new exhibitions at the International Center of Photography show that, whatever else photography may be about, its sheer moving power is to impel you into a single moment’s memory and witness – mortal, vulnerable, mutable, as Sontag says – and also connected to you on some deep organic level.

Elliott Erwitt: Personal Best.

Erwitt’s is the largest of the current group and consists of 60 of what he calls his “personal favorites.”  Some of them are iconic, e.g., his famous shot of a Great Dane (we see only his legs) and a tiny Chihuahua in a hat.  

Or his stark scene of “white” and “colored” drinking fountains in the 60’s South.

All of Erwitt’s work in this show is composed, organized, elegant, intelligent, often witty (he makes visual puns) and, more to the point, true. 

But he also delivers some searing slices of history which convey the emotion at the heart of a composed scene.  Thus, shooting many rolls of film at John F. Kennedy’s funeral in 1962, Erwitt finally captures Jacqueline Kennedy’s unguarded face of grief behind her veil and you are there, with her, in an exposed place that needs no further description because you have been there.

 And all to be continued…