Elliott Erwitt’s

Handbook

)“ar WITH A FOREWORD BY

Charles Flowers
 ISBN 0-9714548-3-3
USA $19.95
CAN $28.99

Elliott Erwitt’s
Handbook
FOREWORD BY

Charles Flowers

What is it about hands? We think we com-

municate with words, but has anyone ever
told that to an Italian? Where did the
expression “tongue- tied” come from? It’s
doubtful anyone ever tied a tongue. But tie
their hands and about half the world’s com-
municators would be silenced. Human (and
sometimes non-human) hands are, with the
possible exception of the eyes, the most
expressive parts of the body, asking for
more or less, telling us to come or to go,
asking questions and answering them,
scolding, rewarding, searching and finding,
and at their most intimate, loving and lust-
ful. Hands calm us, feed us, and
scratch our backs. They intimidate, bless,
encourage, and stop us. They soothe, caress,
and sometimes go where they shouldn’t.
And they draw our attention to the good
and the bad, often suggesting exuberance
or fear. We may take hands for granted. But
Elliott does not. Here is Erwitt at his most
serious-and-yet-whimsical best, giving us
the delicious moments which, without
hands, would not exist.
Elliott Erwitt’s
Handbook
NEW YORK CITY, 1961
Elhott Erwitt’s
Handbook
FOREWORD BY

THE QUANTUCK LANE PRESS

 Copyright © 2003 by Elliott Erwitt

All rights reserved

Printed in Italy

First Edition

Design and typesetting by Katy Homans

Manufacturing by Mondadori Printing, Verona

ISBN 0-9714548-3-3

THE QUANTUCK LANE PRESS

Distributed to the trade by

W. W. Norton & Company, New York, N.Y. rorro and by
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House,
75/76 Wells Street, London wrw 301

1234567890

PHOTOGRAPH PAGE I: JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA, 1968

 Foreword
This collection of Elliott Erwitt’s photos reflects a basic rule of por-
traiture: Always include hands, because they are more expressive than
the face. Although we speak of the “Mona Lisa smile,’ painters note the
“Gioconda pose, the crossed hands that were copied by portraitists for
decades. Quintilian, the first-century Roman rhetorician, advised
would-be orators to use the hands with skill, because they can “almost
be said to speak.”
Erwitt’s famously keen eye stills, in his signature instants of caught
motion, a visual babbling that we barely notice, though it is nearly
incessant. According to one social anthropologist, as much as 60 per
cent of all human communication anywhere in the world is non-verbal,
being accomplished principally with the hands. Another scientist argues
that there are 5,000 different gestures. If he’s right, the 500 ritual ges-
tures of Hindu and Buddhist dance known as mudras make up a classi-
cally spare, rather than flamboyant, catalogue of codified expression.
Such language is known only to insiders. In daily life, too, the hands
obey cultural norms. Some of the gestures shown here will amuse a
Westerner, or simply seem harmless enough, but may shock or outrage
viewers from other parts of the world. As Desmond Morris explained in
Bodytalk, some gestures are specific not just to a region but to a single
country, and the dispersed human family has developed a huge and
diverse repertoire of insulting and obscene hand movements. A hapless
European hitchhiker was suddenly set upon and severely beaten in an
African country because his upraised thumb was a coarse, explicit insult
to passersby. People have been shot at borders for misinterpreting a
nervous guard’s hand gesture: In the Middle East the gesture for “Get
on over here now” looks to Western eyes like, “Get out of here!”
Less dangerously, it is absolutely true, according to researchers who
study such things, that Italians use their hands more than any other
national group when speaking. The semaphore acting of Italian opera
singers, deplored in westward-lying houses, is a natural enough out-
growth. Most people, according to my casual, unscientific polling,
guess that the British must be at the other extreme, using their hands
the least in conversation. In fact, the Japanese take that laurel.
Since conversation is social contact, from the most general to the inti-
mate, it is natural that hands are involved in that contact. Erwitt cap-
tures them jabbing the air, caressing, grabbing, grazing. Sometimes
these hands touch another or others, sometimes their owners. Watching
diners in restaurants, a research team (who ave these people?) found
that speakers in Puerto Rico casually touched interlocutors or them-
selves an average 180 times per hour. Parisians made such hand contact
an average 110 times, Londoners not at all. Poor pitiable Albion.
For surely, as Elhott Erwitt’s Handbook affirms over and over again, we
want to touch and be touched, or we wither away and die. We want to
cradle an infant’s head, for it is another soul in one’s own hard,
restrained hand. We want to be cradled, too, until the last arthritic, gaunt
fetal rictus at the end of life. The untouched child, it sometimes happens,
grows up unable to love or accept love. Children in this collection touch
with sound and with hands. We have to imagine that they will live good
lives, if these photos are accurate biopsies of the human heart.
And if we who hear realize that hands are communicating as words
are spoken, how much more richly and subtly the deaf apprehend and
define their worlds in gesture. Just as other babies prattle in their
cribs, those who cannot hear will gibber away with their chubby dig-
its, practicing to communicate without knowing that what they do is
considered compensation by others—not compensation to them, for it
suffices the need.

An odd fact: Beginning portrait artists typically sketch the hands of

their subject smaller than they should be proportionally. Yet we cer-
tainly know the power and size of our own hands, which are usually as
long as our face. Do we subconsciously diminish the size of a stranger's
hands out of some atavistic, self-protective psychological need? Do we
experience our own hands as larger than others’ for some other rea-
son? Do we hope for longer “lifelines” in the palm?
Ask anyone how they feel about their hands. More than likely, they
look quizzical for a moment, then launch into an answer that is not
new-minted, for they've indeed thought about their hands often before.
“I have my mother’s hands, but I wish I had my father’s . . . they
were wider; he had a firmer grasp.”
“Women say I have unusually big hands, but I don’t relate to that.
But I like the scars I have .. . they’re my history; they're me.”
“IT couldn’t work without my hands, so I’m grateful for them. When
I have to, | measure engineering drawings with them...first to second
knuckle of my index finger is a centimeter, tip of my index finger to
base of palm is 6 inches.”
“They're my work. I am always conscious of not hurting my hands.
I don’t wear gloves when I use the electric saw because they give a
false sense of security.”
“The Korean manicurists say my hands are beautiful because I have
extended nail beds, that pale part under the nail. Now I look at every-
one’s nail beds. They’re right. Most people don’t measure up to mine”
“I gave up playing bass fiddle because girls wouldn’t go out with
me. My hands got too rough and calloused.”
“I have more fun with my hands than I did with my ex-wife.”
“My fingers are too short, so maybe that’s why I look at everyone
else’s fingers for flaws. Like if they’re bitten or unclean, I don’t want
to know the person. I mean it.”
“TI cut my fingernails every other day. Any longer, and you look like
a woman ... and beautiful long nails, slender fingers, they’re the first
thing I look for in a woman.”
It is well said that the face of our maturity is the face we deserve.
Perhaps it is even true. Perhaps the wise gain serenity within the mask
of wrinkles, the vile look haunted. Certainly, and less spiritually, each
of us has the hands we’ve earned—cooking burns, smashed thumbs,
soft fingers, nicotine-stained nails, barked knuckles, tattooed palms,
rope burns, a frozen thumb, a paper cut. .. .
 So the hands tell our stories, suggest character, mark achievements,
record a family.
You will not forget, or have not forgotten, the first time you look
down and suddenly see—calloused or liver-spotted, wrinkled or
scabrous or contracted—the hands you knew long before in child-
hood as the hands of an older relative. My hands now look like my
grandfather’s hands in the year he went mad. Your hands mark the
decades, of course, but also bring you home to your heritage, and
you can rue or celebrate, but you are there. The fix is in. The hands
can betray the age of the face, as we see on page 33 and often
enough in real life. But the hands can create the face, or a version
of it, as on page 60.
But in the practical world, as Aristotle wrote, the hand “is the tool
of tools.” And the first of our hominid ancestors sophisticated enough
to be included in the genus Homo was named for using his hands to
make tools: Homo habilis, “the handyman”. It is this skill, with a few
scattered limited exceptions in nature, that still distinguishes us from
the rest of Earth’s pawing, gnawing fauna.
It was probably long after we at last became Homo sapiens that we
learned to count by using our fingers. For that reason, the counting
system that dominated the world until the binary system of the
Computer Age has a base of 10, although other ancient systems
worked well. The Greeks and Romans chose the basic physical tool of
the mortal human hand as the key to understanding the clear cool
abstract immutable laws of math, arithmetic to calculus.
But it is less the hand’s role to inspire theorems than to act in the
physical world where it can make, build, create, or destroy, steal,
betray. Since we are symmetrical beings, we have looked at our
hands in action over the generations and balanced human good with
evil: In many cultures the right hand is believed to be primary and
benign, the left to be secondary or malign. As is often noted, “sinis-
ter” derives from sinistra, the Latin word for “left” or “on the left
hand.” Yet each hand, left or right, is an equally astonishing mechan-
ical device, the skeleton’s most flexible part, assigned twenty-seven
purpose-built bones and the nineteen muscles that manipulate and
govern them.
Handedness, the subject of much discussion of the politically cor-
rect variety, is anatomically easy to describe—the righthanded person’s
handedness is dominated by the left side of the brain, and vice versa—
but still mysterious. Allowed their own preferences voluntary or invol-
untary, most people of either handedness get along much the same
way in an active life. Baseball, the sport that is America, provides an
exception: There are no lefthanded shortstops playing in the big
leagues. They'd be run over before they could launch the throw. (Try
it.) Another exception is Aurora teetering elegantly en pointe in the
Rose Adagio in The Sleeping Beauty: If one of those princelings incor-
rectly thrust out his left hand when she needed to drop her hand and
steady herself, the ethereal dancer would collapse in a heap on the
planks of a shuddering stage.
But in almost every activity the hand of one’s choice can capably
punch, embroider, scratch, arouse, pilfer, steer, tickle, sketch, clasp,
smack, plink, snap, goose, input, strangle . . . and all the rest.

For all of these reasons and because of his own sensibilities, Erwitt’s
photos of hands are photos of character, of feeling and discourse, of
life in flow guided or articulated by gesture. Although his humor is sly
and his images witty in composition, his work comes down to love of
humanity and of the beauty of life in its homeliest forms. Even the
lords of politics and celebrity who appear here are seen as our fellows,
as members of the natural human democracy.
On page 86 the great cellist Pablo Casals is working with his volcanic
hands, a craftsman producing the mathematical abstractions of baroque
music, but also an aging man regarding the arthritis that has become
his enemy. The adjacent photo shows Casals again, face turned away
from us and head bowed slightly, the world-famous genius of per-
formance now a man alone with his wife Martita, whose smaller fluted
hands gently rearrange his neckwear. His hands, her hands . . . he, she
.. . For Erwitt, who believes more than anything in the likelihood of
love between man and woman, the hands here help reveal who the
people are and how they feel.
As I’ve noted elsewhere, Erwitt does not like hoity-toity, artsy scrib-
bling about his photos. That’s neither fawx nazvete nor an inability to
recognize aesthetic issues. Rather it is his choice to engage the viewer
as human being without reference to trends, techniques, or historical
elements in photography. In a sense, the less one knows about such
things, the more immediate will be the response to the story of his
kind of photo.
Some critics would diss the lack of aesthetic education in the crowd
at a museum opening of Erwitt’s work in New York or Tokyo, Paris or
Madrid, since each untutored individual will enjoy, quoting Immanuel
Kant, an “autonomous aesthetic experience” But, though he would
never use such lingo, Erwitt prefers his viewer to have just that experi-
ence. He wants no screen of preconceptions between you and the photo.
He wants you to see the split-second captured by light and sense,
not the art.
For you cannot rehearse the insight of pages 22-23 against pages
24-25. In the exuberance of the first two photos, the hands splay, fin-
gers stretched outward out of control. In the grim discipline of the
two-page spread that follows, the hand becomes glove-like, the fingers
curtailed. (It is an anatomical singularity that the fingers can work
either separately or as a block.) Even though some of these Chinese
children have not yet lost their sense of humor, and the hands are not
all aligned, the future is clear.
Sometimes, what Hollywood calls “back story” affects our reaction
to a photo here. If you don’t know anything about J. Edgar Hoover,
page 100 shows a nondescript middle-aged man proffering a diffident
wave. If you do know, you might be chilled by that idle gesture of the
man who held Presidents hostage to his policies by means of his secret
files about their personal lives.
If you didn’t know that DeGaulle on page 103 was still arrogantly
in charge of France and her collapsing empire, you might see only an
old man awkwardly saluting as he recalls his heroic youth on some sort
of memorial day. It is the truth of Erwitt’s eye that, even if you do know
the former, you immediately witness thé latter.
In the marvel of our hands, say these photos, there are powers and
wonders. To many, divinity works through them in all ages to heal the
sick, to stop the Old Testament sun in its course for a day, to bless
Akhenaton’s people in ancient Egypt, to protect those who are true
believers in Buddhism.
In these more secular images, Erwitt shows that humanity, too,
works through the hands. Each time you return to these stories, for
that is what they are, you will see yet again, for the photographer has
seen it first, how the hands convey what our words, our facial expres-
sions, sometimes cannot.
PUNTA DEL ESTE, URUGUAY, 199o

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 Afterword
When people ask me how I feel, I usually reply “with my hands and with
my heart”. Or when they ask, “How are you?” I answer “Reasonable,”
thus covering a lot of territory without saying anything in particular. It
is one of my possibly annoying habits to avoid the banal “I’m fine, how
are you?” retort, which I find totally unsatisfactory.
Prompted by the images in this book, I have looked into the matter
of hands and heart and discovered that the heart has a more mechan-
ical function, having to do with blood circulation, while the liver has a
lot to do with the chemistry of one’s emotions. Still, to answer “With
my hands and with my liver” would not ring well.
Thinking even further, nothing negative surfaced about the pleas-
ure that a caress or other emotionally charged hand gesture may give.
So I am going to revise my answers. When asked how I feel, depend-
ing on who asks, my retort will be a gesture with hands apart, palms
up and with a simultaneous shrug of the shoulders indicating things
could be better; or I will simply say “None of your business,” or just
“Why don’t you go out and buy this book?”
EE.
East Hampton
19 July 2002

Thanks list
The usual suspects: my wife Pia, Jeff Ladd, Yayoi Sawada, Charles
Flowers, Katy Homans, Jim Mairs, and my agency, Magnum Photos.

None of the pictures in this book have been digitally altered or manip-
ulated.
 1

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 Elliott Erwivts photographs have been
defining our experience and making us
laugh for more (has half a century. They
are in collections throughout the world,
privately and in most major museums.
#K member of MAGNUM, the prestigious
photo cooperative, he has published over
a dozen books, including the classic
PERSONAL EXPOSURES and, most
recently, SNAPS.

Charles Flowers is the award-winning

author or co-author of fifty-nine books,
including ELLIOTT ERWITT: SNAPS
and, most recently, INSTABILITY
RULES.

The Quantuck Lane Press

Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

500 Fifth Avenue, New 47k, NY 10110
and by W. W. Norte, 4, (s*tle House,
75/76 Wells Streé., anon wir 398
“Erwitt’s photos of hands are photos of character, of feeling and discourse, _|
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