Lartigue jacques-henri biography sample

Jacques-Henri Lartigue was born into a prosperous French family on June 13th, 1894.

 Lartigue was given a large-plate camera at age seven that he operated by standing on a stool. His exhibition at the MOMA and article in Life magazine that year were only the first of a flood of books, exhibitions, articles and films drawing on his photographic collection. That same year, a picture spread published in Life magazine in an issue on John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s death also introduced Lartigue’s work to a wide public.

His family was wealthy and Jacques had a pampered childhood – easygoing tutors for his education, frequent trips to the sea or country for holidays, and endless games with his elder brother Maurice, nicknamed Zissou, and his many friends and relatives.

Jacques recognised very early on how wonderful life in general, and his in particular, was, and seems to have set out to record all the most delightful parts of it as thoroughly as he possibly could.

In 1919, Jacques married Madeleine Messager, the daughter of composer André Messager; their son Dany was born in 1921. Lartigue studied painting at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1915 to 1916 and would always consider himself a painter first and foremost. It was nevertheless as a photographer that he would establish his reputation. Life was truly a joy.

Lartigue: On returning home, I made sketches of all the photos I had taken, before developing them, and I knew so well what I'd shot that you could recognise them, know which had gone wrong, which were good, etcetera.

Second commentator: Lartigue put the text and the sketches away in the albums that he continued to fill to the end of his life.

I try not to bump into it as I walk.

It’s absolutely clear that they were, for him, an important and quite distinct part of his collection, and one of which he was immensely fond.

The little video below shows Lartigue actually viewing his stereos, and it's obvious how absorbed he is in reliving the memories of his youth. In the 1910s and 1920s Lartigue enthusiastically photographed such subjects as automobile races, fashionable ladies at the seashore and the park, and kite flying.

Instead, prints were taken from one half of the stereo pair, and even then often very heavily cropped. It's there I lie in wait, sitting on an iron chair, my camera carefully adjusted. In the 1910s and '20s Lartigue enthusiastically photographed such subjects as automobile races, fashionable ladies at the seashore and the park, and kite flying.

In the 1930s and '40s he continued to capture images of middle-class leisure that, like his earlier images, display a charm and joy that is detached from the traumas of the war. Much to his surprise, he rapidly became one of the twentieth century’s most famous photographers.

Jacques Lartigue was introduced to photography as early as the year 1900 by his father, Henri Lartigue, who gave him his first camera in 1902, when Jacques was eight years old.

Lartigue, 1912–1927 (1980; The Autochromes of J.H. Lartigue, 1912–1927).

He continued to photograph into his 90s, and he extended his settings to include England and the United States during this later period.

Jacques Henri Lartigue was unknown as a photographer until 1963, when, at 69 years old, his work was shown for the first time in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The beauty of the instant, the insouciance of his models, all watched like a game. During their travels, they stopped in New York, where they met with Charles Rado, founder of the photo agency Rapho.