Smash hit

Though still grateful for the welcome afforded his family by the US, Erwitt claims that it is currently impossible to feel warm about America, with its prosecution of a war in which “the great unwashed were lied to”. Would he like to photograph President Bush? “I’m so disgusted by Bush. If I had the opportunity of doing something that made my opinion of him clear I’d be delighted, but who is going to give you that?”

For all his lightness of touch, the political statements in Erwitt’s pictures are starkly resonant; more organic than constructed, seeming to emerge despite himself. He was not intending to address the injustice of racism when he took his iconic 1950 image of segregated drinking fountains in North Carolina. The result has been used ever since, at first as a spur to change and later as a reminder of bad-old-days bigotry, but he refuses to wear any badges for activism or altruism. “These are just things you see. You don’t have to look for anything. It is all there.” Never more so maybe than the pictures of the World Trade Center’s twin towers juxtaposed in the new book with a row of US rockets, symbols of a phallocentric superpower that is not as invulnerable as its citizens once believed. He was at home in the city on September 11, 2001, but has no pictures of the devastation or efforts to clear the site. “I didn’t want to go and photograph it. I went to the blood bank instead.” Too grim? He pauses: “You know, I just don’t know.”

There are no famous faces he would like to photograph: celebrities and office cleaners are all the same to him. He seems to have been entirely underwhelmed by Marilyn Monroe, for example, whose decline he witnessed on the set of her last completed movie, The Misfits, as she scuttled back and forth from LA to New York to see her shrink. Besides, her expertise before the camera made her an unnatural subject for him. “She was a nice person, a little nuts about appointments. She looked better in pictures than in the flesh. There was nothing fascinating for me about her. I didn’t want to take her picture all the time. Some photographers did. I don’t know if that was because she was so interesting for them, maybe more because she was a very commercial subject.”

When I ask him if he brings an assistant on trips, he laughs: “I’m not in the Annie Leibovitz category yet.” Two years ago, on assignment for The Times, he was ejected by Leibovitz’s assistant and still doesn’t fully understand why; the grande dame was mortified and sent flowers, but his worst fears were confirmed. “She’s a fancy lady and she’s protected by a lot of afraid people. They thought I wanted something from her.” His daughter, who arranges celebrity shoots for Vanity Fair, tells him “stunning” stories of celebrities’ demands, water at a certain temperature – “stupid things” – while agents are demanding guarantees of covers and spreads. As someone who travels economy with his father’s good-luck Buddha in his equipment case, does he feel he should be cosseted more? “Maybe travel business class, but that’s all.” One feels he wouldn’t want to make demands, be seen as egotistical. What matters most is his relationship with those he works for, that they be “nice”. In the late 1970s and the 1980s he made numerous films for the TV network HBO, which had picked up on his documentary about Texas cheerleaders, Beauty Knows No Pain, stopping because the organisation’s chain of command changed and “a nasty lady was in charge, so I went back to my day job”.

A couple of days after our meeting, I bumped into him at Magnum’s summer party at a gallery in London. He was wearing a T-shirt declaring “Digital Manipulation Kills Photography”. Having had 100 or so printed, he had brought them along to give out to sympathisers with the cause, of which there were many present. It seemed a rebellious stance for a near-octogenarian, but of all the old-timers celebrating the collective – 93-year-old Eve Arnold and 81-year-old Burt Glinn – Erwitt has remained impervious to the fatigue, grumpiness and cynicism of advancing years. The subject of the Magnum meeting that day had been “the concerned photographer”, of which he is one in the sense of caring for his work and its place in the world, and not one at all in the sense of earnest self-importance.

Watching him, slightly tipsy and almost pinned against the wall by two leggy young admirers, he was having a ball. Not much gets him down, I’d ventured in our interview. “Lawyers get me down,” he had replied. Not just divorce lawyers, he clarified, but the ones acting in his recent suit with his former publisher Phaidon, a nasty and, in his view, “unnecessary” battle over a breach of contract as perceived by the company. The affair has seriously dented his retirement fund, so Erwitt must keep working, travelling, surprising himself with extraordinary photographs he’d forgotten he’d taken. “I would have wanted to keep photographing anyway,” he adds, unnecessarily. “I’m already thinking of my next book title – Second Best! What do you think?”

Personal Best by Elliott Erwitt (teNeues, £70) is published on August 28. It is available from BooksFirst for £63 including p&p. Tel: 0870 165 8585