PORTLAND.- The Portland Art Museum presents Personal Best: Photographs by Elliott Erwitt, on view through April 29, 2007. World-renowned photographer Elliott Erwitt is best known for his black and white candid images of ironic and absurd situations within everyday settings - the master of the "indecisive moment." Personal Best: Photographs by Elliott Erwitt, opening January 22, 2007, will present 88 images picked by the artist as his "personal best." The Portland Art Museum is the first venue to host this intimate retrospective of the acclaimed photographer’s work.

Born in Paris to Russian immigrant parents in 1928, Elliott Erwitt moved to New York in 1948. He studied film at the New School for Social Research, and from the outset his work focused on the day-to-day lives of ordinary people. A talent to capture the poignant ironies of life seemingly without effort distinguishes his work and has earned him the respect of other photographers, critics, and devoted fans, distinguishes his work. A member of Magnum Photo since the 1950s, Erwitt’s photography has been the subject of several books and many one-man exhibitions at such museums as the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Chicago Art Institute.

One of the finest image-makers of his generation, Elliott Erwitt describes himself as "a professional photographer by trade and an amateur photographer by vocation." He sprung to fame through the kitchen debate photograph, taken in 1959, of Khrushchev and Nixon arguing in front of a Westinghouse refrigerator and he has since become one of the best loved observers of life. With unmistakable style and wit, his work captures the famous and the ordinary, the strange and the mundane, during more than half a century.