Elliott ErwittFound not lost

“Over 170 previously unpublished images by photographer Elliott Erwitt are published for the first time in Found, Not Lost. Spanning more than sixty years, the photographs in the book, often taken during lulls or breaks between assignments in his prolific career, have been selected, edited and sequenced by Erwitt himself.
Now in his 90s, Erwitt began the process of re-examining his archive in 2018 after his first retrospective, Home Around The World, faced with the burden and responsibility of being the custodian of his own archive and all that it contains. It was here that the exhaustive process of examining each photograph in his studio began. Over nearly two years, with the help of editor Stuart Smith and long-time studio manager Mio Nakamura, he viewed some 600,000 images – contact sheets and negatives – from those developed in his sink at home when he was seventeen to those from recent assignments in Scotland and Cuba. The sea of images dominated every flat surface for months.
This book was an opportunity for Erwitt to revisit the photographs he made early in his career and discover a meaning at second glance that was not apparent when the image was originally taken. The master of visual one-liners – bold images full of humour, irony and acknowledged absurdity – the photographs selected for this book are quieter, more subtle and suggest Erwitt’s growing confidence in his own eye. In selecting these photographs, he began to examine and question the way his younger self saw the world.”