The American photographer Elliott Erwitt, who has died aged 95, was renowned for his largely unposed images of famous people. Among the political figures he caught on film were Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, laughing and waving a cigar in Havana (1964); Jacqueline Kennedy swathed in a black veil at her husband’s funeral in 1963; and Richard Nixon, pointing and jabbing his finger at Nikita Khrushchev’s chest in 1959.
Cultural figures included Marilyn Monroe showing a leg while filming The Seven Year Itch in 1954; Jack Kerouac, unusually meditative, wearing a tie, in 1953; and Dustin Hoffman, with whom Erwitt made a short film, The Many Faces of Dustin Hoffman (1968). Animals were his obsession, and he devoted several books to pictures of dogs, with titles such as Woof (2005) and DogDogs (1998), as well as another short film, I Bark at Dogs (2011).
