Focus on the Whimsical : Santa Monica show documents almost five decades of the offbeat work and emotional images of photographer Elliott Erwitt

Elliott Erwitt still calls this his hobby , even now, as he sits in the back room of this art gallery, ready for another celebration of his photographic career. And he has made a career of it, of course, traveling with his cameras to commercial assignments around the planet. But there’s little of that sort of work on these many gallery walls today, even if the pictures here inevitably document nearly five decades of wiseacre image-making.

The lucrative commercial work that’s kept Erwitt, his six children and three successive wives happily clothed and fed all these years is not much of a concern here. The show is instead focused on the photography most responsible for his reputation as an artist, and the whimsical visual style that led Robert Capa to invite a young Erwitt into the prestigious Magnum photography agency in 1953.

The photographs are often just snapshots, he likes to say, just heartfelt pictures of his family, of dogs, of strangers, of a couple necking in a parked car at the beach. “This is the magic of my kind of photography,” he says. “It’s a crapshoot. It’s a gift when it happens. It’s nothing you can plan on, and it’s not conceptual, thank God.”

This hobby, this favorite pastime since his days at Hollywood High School in the 1940s, is still how Erwitt spends much of his time between commercial assignments. After all, back in 1959, he’d been at the Moscow Fair only to photograph Westinghouse refrigerators when Vice President Richard Nixon arrived to confront Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in what was later known as the “kitchen debate.” Before it was over, and before returning to his heavy appliances, Erwitt had captured a dramatic image of Nixon jabbing his finger into the chest of the irritated Soviet leader.

Today, as he does most days, Erwitt has brought along a camera, this time a new computerized 35-millimeter gadget, as he visits the G. Ray Hawkins Gallery in Santa Monica, where his career retrospective continues through May 23.

The show offers a wide mixture of images from Erwitt’s career, from scenes of offbeat humor to others revealing a deeper emotional stake: a poignant moment at the funeral of President John F. Kennedy, a child pointing a toy gun playfully, crazily to his own head, and more odd scenes with dogs. “I don’t think my pictures are about anything in particular,” Erwitt says, smiling impishly. “And I think that makes them a little more universal.”

The impact of his pictures on modern photojournalism has been significant, says Peter Galassi, director of the New York Museum of Modern Art’s photography department. “In the period after the war, when black-and-white 35-millimeter globe-trotting photojournalism was one of the things attracting the most talented photographers, that’s when he entered photography,” Galassi says. “He not only made his living doing that kind of work, but he also used the same photography as a way of exploring and commenting on the world from his point of view. He’s an important figure.”

Galassi adds, “And I certainly would not reduce the sensibility of his work to his sense of humor. But it’s hard to make funny photographs. It requires a certain light touch.”

Still, the popularity of some of Erwitt’s family pictures continues to surprise the photographer. Erwitt’s most-published image is almost certainly “Mother and Child,” which captures his first wife, their 6-day-old daughter and a cat sharing a quiet moment in bed. The black-and-white photograph was chosen by influential photographer-curator Edward Steichen for his landmark “Family of Man” exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in the early 1950s. Most recently, the image was used in an advertising campaign for AT&T.;

“That picture has been used in more ads than you can shake a stick at,” says Erwitt, who now works out of a New York studio. “It’s been used by opposing companies, pharmaceuticals, record covers. That picture alone certainly sent my oldest daughter through college.”

That first daughter, Ellen, is 38 now. And for Erwitt, these most unpredictable private moments, illogically timed moments that cannot be re-created, have led to some of his most emotional pictures. “I didn’t take those pictures for any other reason than to put in my wallet and have a record of my children growing up. Well, these seem to be my best pictures, some people think.”

And yet, as a teen-ager, when he first considered photography as a career, he was really just looking to be his own boss. Born in France and raised in Italy by his Russian-born parents before coming to Los Angeles in 1941, Erwitt spoke four languages and was anxious to travel. His first jobs--as a soda jerk on Hollywood Boulevard, as an usher at the Hollywood Bowl, in a printing house--were also proving far less satisfying than earning money as a photographer, taking pictures at his high school prom or of his dentist.

Soon enough, he discovered the work of street photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eugene Atget and other “people who started it all. . . . These were the great people in photography who saw things, and did them without any particular purpose other than just to record what they saw, what they felt. Their pictures are emotional, they’re visual; they’re what pictures should be.”

By 1947, Erwitt was making regular trips to New York City, where Capa, Steichen and photography editor Roy Stryker helped the young photographer win occasional assignments from magazines and Sunday newspaper supplements. When he was drafted into the Army a few years later, Erwitt continued shooting pictures with a small Leica with a collapsible lens, ultimately winning a $1,500 prize from Life magazine. One photograph from that period, of a soldier marching through basic training with his tongue hanging giddily out of his mouth, is included in the Hawkins Gallery show.

“Certainly this art business has developed since then,” he says of contemporary perceptions of his work, along with that of certain other Magnum photographers. “I think at that time it was just a very good way to do something that you liked. It was not just making a living. It’s also having a lifestyle that you liked. It was an opportunity to travel, to see things, to have something to do with the human condition. But I don’t think you could have sat back and said ‘Well, today I’m an artist,’ or ‘This is my art.’ You just tried to lead an interesting life, and hope that something good came of it.”

Erwitt is doing far less of the photojournalism Magnum photographers were once most famous for, though not because he’s no longer interested in the work. Contemporary American magazines have simply shifted their emphasis toward more manufactured glamour portraits of celebrities. He calls Life magazine, for instance, once the publisher of such celebrated photojournalists as W. Eugene Smith and Alfred Eisenstaedt, a “disaster” now.

Erwitt’s emphasis these days is on collections of his black-and-white work in books. At least a third of the pictures at the Santa Monica retrospective are culled from his 1991 book “On the Beach,” all shot at or near the beaches of France, Italy, Ireland, New York, California and elsewhere.

He says he found people at the beach generally open to being photographed, regardless of what state of undress they were in. “Very often people are exhibitionists, and they like to have their picture taken, or they don’t mind too much if you take it,” Erwitt says. “It’s really a matter of instinct and how you approach people. . . . You have to use your nose a little bit. You have to be a little bit sensitive to the situation. I’ve never really gotten into trouble, except in Arab countries, where people don’t like to be photographed, period.”

In a few days, Erwitt was to travel to Japan, ready for the opening of another exhibition of his work, this one entirely of dog pictures. These same photographs are to be collected in another book, to be published in the United States this fall. A few of his dog pictures appear at the Hawkins Gallery, including one of a small terrier in Ireland that seems to be comically floating a few inches above the ground.

“I take pictures of anything that goes under my nose, and a lot of dogs are under my nose,” he says. “And I find dogs sympathetic. They’re easy subjects. And I very much like the anthropomorphic qualities of dogs. Therefore I feel when I take pictures of dogs, I’m really taking pictures of people, or a manifestation of people.”

In any case, it’s just another suitable field for the odd juxtapositions, awkward moments, and strange postures and expressions that Erwitt catches. “I don’t get up in the morning and say, ‘I’m going to be funny.’ If it’s there, that’s fine. I would like to think that it’s more observation than anything else.

“One criticism I might have of some of my colleagues is that for some reason photographers take themselves terribly seriously, which is unfortunate. I don’t think there is any reason for it.”