Jacques-Henri Lartigue Biography Quotes 3 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Jacques Henri Lartigue was born on 13 June 1894 in Courbevoie, near Paris, into a comfortable, cultured family that encouraged curiosity and play. His father, Henri Lartigue, was an enthusiastic amateur photographer who kept up with the newest cameras and processes. From him the boy learned both the mechanics and the pleasures of looking. An older brother, Maurice, nicknamed Zissou, became a chief accomplice in experiments with kites, model airplanes, automobiles, and photographic tricks. The home and garden became a theater where cousins and friends performed for the lens; a now-iconic early picture shows his cousin Bichonnade leaping, her dress billowing as if she might take flight. Lartigue would later say he began photographing at age seven, and the albums he compiled from those years preserve a child's wonder made precise by a camera.

Discovering Photography
From the start he treated photography as a diary of marvels. He recorded family games, pets, fashionable strolls in parks, and, with Zissou and his father, the new spectacles of speed: automobile races, airfield trials, and winter sports. He experimented relentlessly, trying fast shutter speeds, panning to follow passing cars, and odd viewpoints that made bodies hover and machines blur. He also worked with stereo cameras and adopted color processes such as autochrome early on. What makes these images singular is not just their technical verve but their mood: a buoyant, optimistic vision of the Belle Epoque and the interwar years, seen from within the world of leisure that his family inhabited. Year after year he arranged his pictures and captions in carefully annotated albums, a lifelong practice that shaped how his work would be read.

Painting, Personal Life, and the Interwar Years
As he grew older Lartigue pursued painting seriously and exhibited, considering himself first a painter who also photographed. Photography remained a diary, an intimate record rather than a public vocation. In 1919 he married Madeleine Messager, known as Bibi, the daughter of the composer Andre Messager, and their son Daniel was born a few years later. The life they shared brought him into Parisian artistic circles while he continued to photograph family, seaside summers, and fashionable friends. In the early 1930s he photographed Renee Perle, whose elegance and presence became a motif in his pictures; their collaboration shows his instinct for style and the poise of modern life. Later, Florette became his closest companion and, eventually, his wife; she appears throughout the later albums and helped him organize and safeguard his work. Through the 1920s and 1930s, even as Europe darkened, his pictures kept faith with everyday moments: a shadow on a wall, a hat caught by wind, a friend laughing on a terrace.

Recognition and Rediscovery
For decades Lartigue was better known as a painter in France than as a photographer. That changed dramatically in the early 1960s when curators and editors began to look closely at his albums. John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art in New York recognized the originality of the youthful work and organized a 1963 exhibition that introduced him to an international audience. The timing coincided with a broad interest in the snapshot aesthetic and in vernacular modernism. Editors and photographers such as Richard Avedon championed his vision, and publishers including Robert Delpire helped bring his pictures and diary excerpts to a wider public in books that respected his album form. Magazines reproduced his images, and he undertook new assignments, including fashion and portrait work that showed how fully his sense of movement and light translated to contemporary commissions. The late recognition did not change the essential nature of his project; it instead confirmed that his private diary held the seeds of a public history of modern life.

Late Career, Public Honors, and Legacy
Lartigue's gifts remained evident into old age. In 1974 he was asked to make the official portrait of the French president Valery Giscard d Estaing, a sign that his elegance of seeing had become part of national culture. He continued to photograph and to paint, and he kept revisiting his albums, refining selections and captions as if to tune the music of memory. With Florette by his side, he worked to secure the future of his archive; in 1979 he formally donated his photographic work to the French state, ensuring its preservation and study. He died on 12 September 1986 in Nice, having lived long enough to witness the transformation of his youthful play into a cornerstone of photographic history.

The people around Lartigue were essential to his art. Henri Lartigue's curiosity seeded the craft; Zissou's appetite for speed and invention became the subject of countless pictures; Bichonnade, cousins, and friends animated the early scenes. Bibi and Daniel anchored family life between the wars, while Renee Perle brought a distilled modern grace to his 1930s photographs. Florette offered companionship and stewardship in the decades when his work found new readers. Beyond the family, John Szarkowski's curatorial insight, Robert Delpire's publishing acumen, and Richard Avedon's advocacy helped articulate why these images matter. Today Lartigue is recognized as a poet of the instantaneous, a recorder of joy, flight, and fashioning of the self. His albums, with their dates, captions, and sequences, remain a model of how photography can become autobiography, and how private seeing can illuminate a century.

Our collection contains 3 quotes who is written by Jacques-Henri, under the main topics: Live in the Moment - Art - Excitement.