Elliot Ervitt was born in 1928 in Paris France. He is an advertising and documentary photographer that was known for his black and white shots of absurd situations in the everyday moment. He studied photography and filmmaking at the Los Angeles City College and the New School for Social Reasearch. He then became a photographers assistant while he was in the army in France and Germany in the 1950's. He then began working as a freelance photographer and shot photographs all over the world. He was also a filmaker creating feature films, commercials and documentaries.
His work is an inspiration to me because he was photographing during a time when cameras where not of the quality that we have today and yet he managed to take some of the most important photographs in history. He photographed famous people and famous events like John F. Kennedy's funeral and Marilyn Monroe. A photograph that I was especially drawn to was in his " Collectors Prints." It does not have a title but it is the only landscape in this group although he includes landscapes in some of his other photographs as well. This one has a train cutting through the landscape with a huge cloud of smoke. The sky is clear so the smoke is very strong visually. It seems to talk about the beauty of the landscape that is being ruined by man's pollution. There is a black curved stripe along the top and bottom of the photograph that seems to be created by a curved opening in the lens. The landscape seems a bit surreal much like alot of his other work of people doing ordinary things in extraordinary ways
.http://www.elliotterwitt.com/lang/en/index.html
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