Elliot Erwitt's Kolor

Elliott Erwitt's Kolor gathers the color photography that his famous black-and-white street work spent decades overshadowing. It was the first book built entirely from that side of his archive.

To build it, Erwitt combed through nearly half a million 35mm color slides shot across his career and narrowed them to roughly 450 images. teNeues published the 447-page hardcover in 2013. The pictures run from the 1950s through the early 1990s and move between world leaders and magazine cover girls, market stalls and military camps, Las Vegas and Venice. Erwitt shot much of this material on paid assignments, including ad campaigns for David Ogilvy, so the book sits somewhere between commercial work and his own restless eye. The New Yorker called it a thoughtful exploration of more than thirty years of photography; Details.com noted that it finally gave his color archive a place alongside the black-and-white images that built his reputation.

Erwitt is best known for the deadpan, dog-level black-and-white photographs he made over a sixty-year career, from Cold War summits to Marilyn Monroe on set. Kolor was his case that the color archive he shot alongside that work, largely unseen until this book, deserved to stand next to it.