Photos: Warm sun and cool women in Belle-Époque France
The privileged world view of Jacques Henri Lartigue
Emerging technologies are often early-adopted by the rich. Like the electric cars and iPhone’s of today, the latest and greatest gadgets of the early 20th century were the purview of elites with enough dough—and free time—to put them to use. The camera was one of them.
The experience of Belle-Époque France’s upper class was marked by pleasure and privilege. Young men were mechanically-inclined dilettantes and playboys, racing cars in the countryside or sunbathing with models. Paris was under renovation, and as a medium which embodied technical innovation and the period’s rapidly changing perception of time, photography fit squarely into the era’s cultural ethos.
It was this world that Jacques Henri Lartigue was born into in 1894. Gifted his first camera at age seven, the boy never looked back.
Taking pictures gave Lartigue a hobby and a purpose. His immediate surroundings and leisure class milieu provided the subject matter and Lartigue, a native user, wielded his camera with technical mastery almost from the beginning. He also brought a child’s whimsy to photography’s staid practice of posing and composing. Lartigue had a low vantage, a wandering eye, and a loose frame that was far ahead of his time. He also had the resources and time to experiment. Lartigue continued photographing prolifically into his teens and early adulthood, finding muses in his wives and mistresses and the diversions of prolonged adolescence.
Viewed almost a century later, Lartigue’s images still feel decidedly contemporary. His pictures are nothing if not sincere, and his access gives us one of the most authentic and candid representations of 20th Century privilege anywhere. They also reiterate the importance of so-called amateurs in the development of the medium—a notion which in recent years has taken on new significance with the democratization of digital and mobile phone photography.
Lartigue lived most of his life in relative obscurity. His photographs weren’t recognized as art until a 1963 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He was 69 years old, a respected painter, and had still never worked a day in his life.
