"In photography, thinking isn't of much use - you have to see"

Of all of the celebrity deaths yesterday - Henry Kissinger, Shane MacGowan, Alistair Darling, Dean Sullivan - that of Elliott Erwitt is likely to command the fewest column inches in print and online, at least in the UK. But the passing of this resolutely unpretentious titan of twentieth-century photography, a Magnum mainstay, should not be overshadowed.

As Jonas Cuenin notes in this piece for Blind, Erwitt was certainly a political photographer, but perhaps above all he was a keen observer of the "human comedy". The mischievous streak came out in his work; even in the early days, "[h]e would poke fun at the world, de-dramatize what would be shocking, hunt down the comical, and photograph the street as if it were a comic strip".

I first encountered Erwitt's work at an exhibition in Cardiff in 2017: an image of a bird mirroring a tap, gifted to David Hurn as part of the latter's lifelong Swaps project, which perfectly encapsulated his eye for amusing juxtaposition. Wit is so often lost or neglected in serious talk about celebrated photographers; with Erwitt, that seems impossible.

This Guardian gallery showcases some of his finest pictures, Marilyn Munroe and assorted dogs being recurrent subjects.