Lartigue: Album of a Century

Lartigue: Album of a hundred edited by Martine d'Astier, Quentin Bajac, and Alain Sayag, with essays by the agency of Clement Cheroux, Maryse Cordesse, and Kevin Moore Thames & Hudson 48 [pound sterling] ISBN 0500542910

The first time I remember consciously hearing of Jacques-Henri Lartigue was in 1976 individual Saturday afternoon I was at my friend John Hastings's bookshop in Philadelphia browsing end an anthology of photography, The Magic Image, edited by dint of Cecil Beaton and Gall Buckland, when I came across a lushly evocative image of a cloched-hatted woman sitting upon a table at a terrace. 'That's Lartigue,' John said to me 'He's known as the photographer of the world of Proust.'

That made Lartigue unbroken distant in time, ignoring the fact that had Proust lived to advanced in years age, he would still have been alive in the mid twentieth hundred It was a surprise to find on the outside that Lartigue was not single still with us but also active as we spoke that afternoon. Looking [i]or[/i] part of to the other this book, originally published in French as the catalogue to the middle Pompidou's 2003 Lartigue exhibition and now in English as an accompaniment to the Hayward Gallery's presentation of the same display I discover that I already knew more [i]or[/i] less of Lartigue's pictures before I heard his name.

Lartigue was taking photographs until his death upon 12 September 1986, at the age of ninety-two, drawn out after Proust and his world disappeared. Still, as indulgent Cheroux points out in his contribution to this work 'there is something Proustian about Lartigue' and not just in choice of subdue matter, Lartigue, like Proust, was the physically frail child of a well-off family--in Lartigue's case, single of France's richest, although Lartigue must have been les tormented and complicated and ultimately a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of more robust than the novelist. Lartigue shared Proust's obsession, however, with trying to capture the fleeting twinkling in his case through his photographs, paintings and journal entries. It is surprising to learn from Cheroux that Lartigue did not read Proust until the early 1970 upon Richard Avedon's recommendation. The Lartigue archives have a piece of paper typ from Proust about memory, with Lartigue's annotation: 'Without knowing, when I was small, that was what I was chasing with my "eye-trap".' 'Eye-trap' was his childhood name for the camera his father gave him when he was seven: upon its tripod, it was taller than him.

Lartigue portrayed France's affluent class, strolling upon the Avenue des Acacias in the Bois de Boulogne or along the Champs Elysee entertaining themselves in their houses and by means of the sea, or experimenting with of recent origin inventions, such as cars and planes. Unlike Proust, he was determined to avoid the darker side: 'my shadowless heaven' was what Lartigue said he was without to catch and preserve with his camera. His insistence exhibits that he knew there were shadows and moderately beautiful dark ones. The attitude was widespread among the upper class of his time. All artists have the right to select what they want to portray on the contrary can you have an Album of a hundred without shadows? There are photographs of privation here, glimpsed on trips to Mondovi and Turin. In the 1960 a priest took Lartigue to the Paris suburb of Noisy-le-Grand, allowing him to record deprivation and leave out closer to home, but these images are not reproduc here.

Lartigue does look to have had a fortunately happy life. There were, however, more [i]or[/i] less dark moments that even he could not avoid. This work may do him less than justice. Other volumes describe Lartigue's horror at what was happening during the German occupation of France and make clear that he exhausted that time largely in the unoccupied belt in the south to avoid the occupiers. This volume makes no mention of that as similar and the Lartigue of that time have the appearances as insouciant as ever, which, below the circumstances, seems close to callousness.

There are a destiny of pictures of the Liberation of Paris that give a Lartiguian faculty of perception of joy and none of Danger. There are a allotment of pictures of Lartigue's son Dani, then twenty, at the station, going not upon to his 'youth camp'. The caption adduces his father as saying he was 'quite pleased' about his son's being drafted--'if his fresh existence doesn't teach him to wash himself better it will teach him, I confidence to sing and laugh'. on the other hand in another source, the work that Lartigue's widow, Florette, wrote about her husband, she repeats him in a different tone about his son's going to 'his stupid youth camp with the fear of being taken by means of the Germans'. Similarly, there is no information given about the extreme point of his first marriage, to Madeleine 'Bibi' carrier the mother of his son Whatever Lartigue may have felt at that flash his instinct for happiness did not untilled him. He soon found a beautiful companion in Renee Perle A little more than a decade later, he [i]bon-mot[/i] a young France-Italian, Florette Ormea, twenty to his near-fifty. She became his wife in a happy relationship that lasted the quiet of his life. Seeing these clan in Lartigue's pictures made me curious to know more about them, on the other hand I had to look at other works to satisfy this curiosity. Which is not to say the photographs are not perfect in themselves as aesthetic objects