Love Quote by Jacques-Henri Lartigue

Love is Lartigue's first technical choice. He’s not talking about romance; he’s naming an ethic of attention, the kind that turns a fleeting pleasure into something worth preserving. “I take photographs with love” frames the camera less as a measuring device than a way of being present, and it helps explain why his images feel buoyant without becoming empty: affection sharpens, it doesn’t soften.

The next move is quietly ambitious: “so I try to make them art objects.” Lartigue isn’t claiming the grand, documentary authority of the 20th century photojournalist. He’s arguing for the photograph as a crafted thing with its own gravity - an object meant to be held, kept, revisited. There’s a subtle pushback here against photography’s supposed immediacy. If the medium can be dismissed as mere capture, he insists on design, selection, and the discipline of making.

Then comes the line that gives the whole quote its spine: “But I make them for myself first and foremost.” It’s a refusal of the crowd’s gaze, and it’s also a defense against sentimentality. By centering the self, Lartigue sidesteps the pressure to perform significance. The paradox is that this private intention is exactly what makes the work public. Photographs made to impress age quickly; photographs made to remember carry their own internal weather.

In context, this is Lartigue’s lifelong project: turning personal delight, speed, fashion, leisure, and motion into a visual diary so precise it becomes history by accident. The “important” isn’t modesty. It’s a manifesto for sincerity as method.