The early life of Elliott Erwitt, who has died aged 95, was marked by upheaval and conflict. His Russian Jewish parents had fled their home country after the Russian Revolution to France, where he was born in 1928. The family then headed to Milan, only to return to Paris to escape Mussolini’s regime. They eventually migrated to the US, just as the second world war began. Erwitt was drafted for military service in 1951, and served in Germany and France.
Photography, at first, provided young Erwitt the opportunity to retreat from the world. One of his first interactions with the medium as a teenager was printing headshots of actors in a commercial darkroom in Los Angeles. Later, he would photograph Hollywood’s most famous stars himself, including Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich and Grace Kelly.
