Happy Thanksgiving
A postcard from Elliott Erwitt
Art Dogs is a monthly-ish dispatch introducing the pets—dogs, yes!, but also cats, lizards, marmosets, and more—that were kept by our favorite artists. Subscribe to receive these ~monthly posts to your email inbox.
Last year, I published a short Art Dogs edition for Thanksgiving:
The best image in that post you can see in the preview above—a photo of Snoopy ice skating around the southern bend of Central Park West.
After hitting publish, a reader,
, made me aware of a fantastic photo by Elliott Erwitt. I woke up wanting to share that photo with you today:
Elliott captured this scene of two of his daughters, Sasha and Amy, sitting by the living room window during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1988. He and his family bought the three-bedroom apartment at the corner of West 69th Street, overlooking Central Park, for $75,000 in the late 1960s.1
According to another of his six children, Jennifer Erwitt, “It was a big stretch to make that purchase,” she told The New York Times. “He was successful, but I don’t think he was really wealthy.” Jennifer can remember watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parades with family and friends from the living room as one of her favorite memories of the Manhattan apartment. In this short video, Elliott recalls a time when Superman’s foot smacked against their apartment window.
Elliott Erwitt lived until the age of 95, spending nearly 60 of those years on the Upper West Side. He passed away in 2023 on November 29th—one year ago tomorrow.
Beyond Snoopy, dogs were one of his favorite subjects, especially Sammy, his cairn terrier.
Make sure to look closely at Elliott’s tie in this self-portrait.
“I bark at dogs and get odd reactions sometimes, in this case, every time I barked the dog jumped.” - Elliott Erwitt
“I always thought of [Elliott’s] pictures as New Yorker cartoons — he was amused by humanity in general.” — Rick Smolan.
In an extract from one of his eight books of dog photographs, Elliott explained why dogs went from “an incidental part of his photographic practice” to the subject of some of his most famous works:
“I am a professional photographer by trade and an amateur photographer by vocation. Most of the time when I am out of the house I carry a small unobtrusive camera and I snap away obsessively at things that interest me and whatever I think would make a good picture. Until recently, I have never especially set out to take dog pictures but somehow dogs appeared in large numbers on my contact sheets. A few years back while looking through my inventory of pictures to assemble a retrospective book and exhibition of random photographs taken on my travels, I was surprised by the preponderance of dogs. Obviously, my sympathy for the creatures was deeper than I had imagined.
Many of the dogs pictured must have looked appealing to me in their exotic settings, other dogs were appealing in reasonably well-composed photographs and some others seemed to transcend their easy obvious charm and to have allegorical connotations to us humans and our human condition. As I think about this now, my comments don’t sound particularly surprising. I don’t know of any other animals closer to us in qualities of heart, sentiment and loyalty. Some people say elephants come close. Personally, I find elephants too bulky, unwieldy and inaccessible for everyday photography and not at all cuddly or attractive with those big long noses. Besides, they do not roam the streets in every town and country like dogs do. And dogs make easy, uncomplaining targets without the self-conscious hang-ups and possible objections of humans caught on film.”
You can enjoy more of Elliott’s photographs on the Magnum website and his personal website.
Happy Thanksgiving, Art Dogs.
Bailey
“I decided to photograph from a dog’s point of view because dogs see more shoes than anybody.” — Elliott Erwitt
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/21/realestate/elliott-erwitt-nyc-apartment-sale.html
Happy Thanksgiving! I love the picture of the levitating dog!
Happy Thanksgiving, Bailey! 🍁