Jacques Henri Lartigue

Early Days

Jacques Lartigue was born in 1894 in Courbevoie, just outside Paris. His family was wealthy and Jacques had a pampered childhood – easygoing tutors for his education, frequent trips to the sea or country for holidays, and endless games with his elder brother Maurice, nicknamed Zissou, and his many friends and relatives.

Jacques recognised very early on how wonderful life in general, and his in particular, were, and seems to have set out to record all the most delightful parts of it as thoroughly as he possibly could. He did this through his written journals, his paintings and his photographs.

Although Lartigue made his living as a painter, and exhibited successfully throughout his life, neither his paintings nor his journals are of any great interest or merit. His photographs, however, were from the beginning quite exceptional. He had a natural ability to capture fleeting moments, if necessary creating them himself, in brilliant compositions that look utterly casual and artless.

He was also remarkably industrious, producing over a long life around 100,000 images of various sorts, many of them filed and documented in the 100 huge albums that ultimately became what is probably the finest visual autobiography ever produced. Of these, many of the early photographs, and probably a majority of the best known were originally taken in stereo.

The Stereos

Lartigue continued taking stereos until around 1929, by which time it must have been increasingly difficult to obtain the glass plates he still used. In total there are around 5,000 stereo photographs in the Lartigue archive in Paris, all on glass, all but about fifty in black and white, and all carefully preserved in individual paper envelopes in wooden storage boxes.

When, in 1976, the creation of a Fondation Lartigue was first mooted, he enthused about ‘all my treasures (albums, negatives, stereos, paintings, journals etc)’ and there are several other entries in his memoirs where he singles out the stereos for special mention. It’s absolutely clear that they were, for him, an important and quite distinct part of his collection, and one of which he was immensely fond.

It’s a great shame therefore that when his childhood photographs were brought to the attention of the world by John Szarkowski and Richard Avedon in 1963, the fact that the images were stereo was simply ignored. Instead, prints were taken from one half of the stereo pair, and even then often very heavily cropped. The example below is extreme, but far from unique.

Clearly the cropped image has more impact on the screen, where the poor resolution has little consequence, but viewed in a good stereoscope the stereo image has more depth, more interest, and a richer composition.

In reading these photographs it's crucial to understand that Lartigue's main motivation was to capture the entirety of an event - he said repeatedly that he wanted to hold forever the image, the colour, the sound, the scent - everything that would enable him to relive the moment more fully. The stereo image does this incomparably better than the flat one, which is infinitely less involving.

Some more examples of Lartigue stereos.

Since then, the stereos have lain in the archives of the Fondation Lartigue, not entirely neglected – there was a small edition of a dozen stereos, Le troisième œil, published in 1988 – but certainly unknown to all but a very few specialists. Hidden Depths is the first and so far only publication to give a comprehensive overview of these wonderful photographs.

The Moving Finger Writes...

His discovery in the USA began around 1963, when Lartigue was already 69 years old, so only at what would be considered well past retirement age for most men did Lartigue become a professional photographer. His exhibition at the MOMA and article in Life magazine that year were only the first of a flood of books, exhibitions, articles and films drawing on his photographic collection. He continued taking professional assignments and photographing for his own amusement right up to his death in Nice in 1986 at the age of 92.

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