Magnum Editions: Paris, France, 1970

Elliott Erwitt was born in Paris in 1928, spent his childhood in Milan and emigrated to the U.S. in 1939, where the teenaged Erwitt’s interest in photography blossomed. For Erwitt a driving creative force is his “concern with humanity and human comedy” and in 1970 he brought this sensibility to bear on a study of his birth city. As with other major bodies of work focused on the U.K., U.S., Italy and Cuba, Erwitt’s Paris opus ranges across all perspectives of the French capital, capturing everything from grand vistas to intimate detail and, of course, human comedy.