Elliott Erwitt. Retrospective

In 2026 the History Meeting House celebrates its 20th birthday. To mark the occasion the museum presents an exhibition of nearly 130 photographs by Elliott Erwitt, the legendary photographer of the Magnum Photos agency. It is the first retrospective of this scale in Poland, covering more than 70 years of Erwitt’s work - an artist who still inspires photographers of every generation around the world.

Elliott Erwitt was born in Paris and spent his childhood in Italy; his family later returned to France and, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, moved to the United States. He began taking photographs in his early youth and, over several decades of his career, documented the political and social history of the twentieth century. As a photojournalist he travelled across the United States, Europe, Cuba, Nicaragua, Mexico, Japan and Pakistan, and he also worked in advertising and film. When he joined Magnum in 1953 at Robert Capa’s invitation, he was already working as a freelancer and his pictures were appearing in leading American magazines. On assignment for Time magazine he visited Poland twice, in 1959 and 1964, photographing in Warsaw, Krakow, Czestochowa and Gdansk among other places. In the late 1960s he served three years as president of Magnum.

For several decades Erwitt recorded the everyday life of ordinary and extraordinary people, documenting fleeting and historic moments with great care but above all with humour and devotion. The way he looked at Paris, New York, Saint Tropez and Warsaw changed how people saw those places and how they talked about them. No one else, photographing dogs, portrayed their owners so well - which is probably why those pictures are among the best loved and most iconic in his body of work.

The photographs on show combine wit, absurdity and elegance. The curators draw attention to the bright side of human nature and to the beauty of ordinary moments that usually slip away under the weight of daily life.