Jacques Henri Lartigue, childhood in pictures
« French photographer (1894-1986), who photographed his family's Belle Époque from age eight with an undimmed freshness. »
Lartigue received his first camera at six, made his first prints at eight. Son of a wealthy family, he photographed his brother Zissou inventing gliders, bobsleds, water skis avant la lettre. His parents staged car races at Auteuil, tennis matches, walks in the Bois — he was there, a precocious photographer.
He kept going all his life. But it was only in 1963, when MoMA exhibited his childhood photographs at 69, that he was recognised as a photographer. For 60 years he had thought of himself as a painter — he was that too — photography being a hobby. Life made him its cover the same year.
His gift for catching motion — cars, leaps, sea spray — anticipated Cartier-Bresson by decades. He donated his archive to the French state in 1979, about 110,000 negatives. He died at 92, leaving the most complete and lightest body of childhood photography of the 20th century.