Jacques Henri Lartigue

Best known for his famous photographs of Parisian women, planes and automobiles, Jacques Henri Lartigue was a French painter and photographer in the 20^th century. From a young age, Lartigue was a keen photographer, documenting activities in his own life which incorporated movement into his work, thus becoming an integral part. He documented images in various forms and sizes. His greatest achievement was his set of around 120 huge photograph albums, which compose the finest visual autobiography ever produced. However, during this period he focused mostly on his paintings which earned him more than his initial photographs. In the 60’s when Lartigue was aged 69 his boyhood photographs were finally discovered by Charles Rado of the Rapho agency, who introduced him to John Szarkowski, then curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who in turn arranged an exhibition of his work at the museum. Consequently, a spread of his images was then shown in Life Magazine in 1963, showcasing his images to a mass audience. He was then hailed as being one of the founders of modern photography.“Striking though they are, Lartgue’s pictures are not precedent. Instant photography, which arrested movement for humorous effect, was a cliché of the amateur repertoire. Lartigue simply did what everyone else was doing but with more flair and more daring”“All the jumping and flying in his photographs, it looks like the whole world at the turn of the century is on springs or something. There’s a kind if spirit of liberation that’s happening at the time and Lartigue matches that up with what stop action photography can do at the time, you these really dynamic pictures.”