Elliott Erwitt at the Museo di Roma

“It’s such a relief to speak English!” says Elliott Erwitt, sinking gratefully on to a wooden bench in a quiet anteroom of the Museo di Roma, near Piazza Navona. “It is so tiring not being able to say exactly what you want to say.”

Erwitt has every right to feel weary. Not only has the 79-year-old Manhattan-based photographer just flown into Rome but he has also spent all afternoon giving interviews to journalists in Italian about his latest show. Entitled Elliott Erwitt’s Rome , it is a collection of photographs of the city taken over a 50-year period and collated in a book of the same title.

Erwitt’s linguistic facility – he also speaks French and some Russian – is the legacy of his nomadic childhood. He was born in Paris in 1928; his Russian-Jewish family lived in Milan before fleeing Mussolini in 1938. After spells in France and New York, they settled in Los Angeles in 1941.

It should have been the beginning of the American Dream but the reality was grittier. His parents divorced and, although his father got custody, Erwitt senior subsequently skipped town to avoid alimony payments. “At the age of 15, I was on my own and had to fend for myself,” recalls the snowy-haired photographer.

He found work processing celebrity prints in a Hollywood darkroom, and started taking his own snaps with no idea that his talent was out of the ordinary. “I just did it. It evolved.”

Touchingly, Erwitt is devoid of bitterness at his father’s betrayal. He describes him as “a wonderful man” who, after working as “an engineer, a not very good businessman and a Buddhist priest”, became a photographer himself. “He said he wanted ‘to follow in the footsteps of his son’.”

Erwitt père had a tough act to follow. Erwitt is one of the most respected photographers of a generation that encompasses Robert Frank, Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander. He has published more than 30 books, made numerous documentary films and exhibited in venues including MoMA and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Yet he remains the most shy and self-deprecating of characters. He describes his 60-year career as “a pleasant experience”; his chief regret is “the four hours I spent in Paris airport this morning”; his main ambition is “to get back to New York ... to get my laundry done.”

Manhattan has been his home for more than 50 years. He lives in an apartment overlooking Central Park with his fourth wife, the German novelist and filmmaker Pia Frankenberg. For Erwitt, an inveterate globetrotter, home is “where you are at the moment for as long as you don’t go somewhere else”.

With just his cameras for company, Erwitt’s low-maintenace roving – “recently I walked around Paris all day and I only got one picture out of it, but it was a good one” – is in the tradition of the great early modernist snappers such as Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom he cites as a “major influence”.

It was Cartier-Bresson’s partner, the legendary Robert Capa, who spotted Erwitt’s potential and invited him to join Magnum in 1953. His association with photojournalism’s most prestigious agency gave him access to week-long shoots of Marilyn Monroe – “she was good. Sensitive” – and Fidel Castro, whom he describes as “very sympathetic”. He documented the Kennedy era in the White House, covered the 1957 Sputnik launch, and snapped Nixon and Khrushchev quarrelling in Moscow in 1959. His photograph of segregated water fountains in 1950 North Carolina became one of the iconic images of the civil rights movement.

Yet Erwitt is most famous for pictures that make you smile. Gentler than Arbus, more light-hearted than Frank, less detached than Friedlander, he is a conjurer of witty, insouciant moments that, even if occasionally staged, possess a beguiling, off-the-cuff charm: a couple captured kissing in a side-view mirror; the nudist wedding where the bride wears just a veil and garter; a ballerina in a raincoat captured in mid-jeté against a rainy Paris skyline.

Dogs are a favourite subject; eight books are devoted to canine models in diverting poses. Most famous is “Felix, Gladys and Rover”, 1974, which lines up the legs of a Great Dane, with a woman in rubber boots and a Chihuahua. Why the passion for pooches?

“Why not? Dogs are expressive; they are everywhere; they are sympathetic.” A mischievous pause. “And they don’t ask for prints.”

Yet there is a risk that Erwitt’s reputation as a humorist will eclipse his capacity for revelation. JFK gazes out of the White House window as if dreaming of freedom; Castro has the eyes of a poet; those rusty water fountains are as grim a symbol of injustice as any prison cell. Most perceptive of all is his portrait of Monroe. Grinning from behind her hand, a script on her lap, for once she is neither doomed siren nor cartoon sex symbol but a working woman, humorous, relaxed and intelligent.

Under Erwitt’s eye, Rome is transformed from monumental metropolis into a stage for everyday, intimate human drama. “The majestic part is the background; no place is interesting without people, dogs, cats, anything that breathes.”

A young couple kiss on the steps of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, and it is her cheap handbag wedged beneath their feet that holds the eye rather than the cathedral’s rearing columns; the awesome masonry of the Baths of Caracalla is merely a frame for a crouched black cat; a runner pauses for breath in the Stadio dei Marmi, his weary figure a stark contrast to the classical statues gazing blankly out over the empty space.

Make no mistake, Erwitt loves this city. “Rome is a visual feast. It’s much more picturesque than any of the other places.” (The book is the third in a series which has already covered New York and Paris.) “It’s so compact, so dense, so full of surprises.”

There are sublime exposés. A group of anonymous men in overcoats – one of those masculine coteries that fuel Italy’s invisible engines – rock purposefully outside a half-open portal, mobile phones clamped to their ears. Pope Benedict XVI waves from a white 4x4, flanked by a dozen youths in sharp suits and sunglasses. An elderly lady kneels at a confessional, the kitsch marble columns a reminder that not every church was decorated by Bernini.

Unflinching yet never cruel, this vision owes a debt to postwar Italian neo-realist cinema. “Neo-realism had to do with emotion,” Erwitt says, “rather than things that were conjured up.”

His distaste for manufactured images has made him an impassioned opponent of digital manipulation. “Digital photography is a great tool ...” he explains, “as long as you don’t manipulate pictures. That undermines the basic quality of the photography which is what is in front of the camera.”

This fidelity to the authentic explains Erwitt’s contempt for the new generation of photographers whose digitally manipulated works sell for hundreds of thousands. “Liberate me from that,” he mutters when I mention it. Last year, he even published a book, The Art of André S Solidor, with interviews and pictures that parodied the likes of Andreas Gursky, Cindy Sherman and Helmut Newton.

He is adamant that he does not consider himself an artist. “That’s somebody else’s problem. I consider myself a reasonable craftsperson.” Such modesty belies the power of images that, whether sweet or sad, funny or ominous, are clearly animated by what Cartier-Bresson once described as the “poetry of life’s reality”.

Asked what makes a great photographer, Erwitt pauses, then quotes a friend: “She said it was someone who shows you something you can’t see yourself.” Few artists can hope to do more.

‘Elliott Erwitt’s Rome’, Museo di Roma, until 31 January 2010. Tel: +39 06 8207 7304

‘Elliott Erwitt’s Rome’ is published by teNeues.
www.teneues.com