Lartigue: Album of a Century

Apollo, Dec, 2004 by David Platzer

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

The first time I remember consciously hearing of Jacques-Henri Lartigue was in 1976. One Saturday afternoon I was at my friend John Hastings's bookshop in Philadelphia browsing through an anthology of photography, The Magic Image, edited by Cecil Beaton and Gall Buckland, when I came across a lushly evocative image of a cloched-hatted woman sitting on 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 sound distant in time, ignoring the fact that had Proust lived to old age, he would still have been alive in the mid twentieth century. It was a surprise to find out that Lartigue was not only still with us but also active as we spoke that afternoon. Looking through this book, originally published in French as the catalogue to the Centre Pompidou's 2003 Lartigue exhibition and now in English as an accompaniment to the Hayward Gallery's presentation of the same show, I discover that I already knew some of Lartigue's pictures before I heard his name.

Lartigue was taking photographs until his death on 12 September 1986, at the age of ninety-two, long after Proust and his world disappeared. Still, as Clement Cheroux points out in his contribution to this book, 'there is something Proustian about Lartigue' and not just in choice of subject matter, Lartigue, like Proust, was the physically frail child of a well-off family--in Lartigue's case, one of France's richest, although Lartigue must have been less tormented and complicated and ultimately much more robust than the novelist. Lartigue shared Proust's obsession, however, with trying to capture the fleeting moment, 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 1970s, on Richard Avedon's recommendation. The Lartigue archives have a piece of paper typed 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: on its tripod, it was taller than him.

Lartigue portrayed France's affluent class, strolling on the Avenue des Acacias in the Bois de Boulogne or along the Champs Elysees, entertaining themselves in their houses and by the sea, or experimenting with new 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 out to catch and preserve with his camera. His insistence shows that he knew there were shadows and pretty dark ones. The attitude was widespread among the upper class of his time. All artists have the right to choose what they want to portray but can you have an Album of a Century without shadows? There are photographs of poverty here, glimpsed on trips to Mondovi and Turin. In the 1960s, a priest took Lartigue to the Paris suburb of Noisy-le-Grand, allowing him to record deprivation and neglect closer to home, but these images are not reproduced here.

Lartigue does seem to have had a fortunately happy life. There were, however, some dark moments that even he could not avoid. This book may do him less than justice. Other books describe Lartigue's horror at what was happening during the German occupation of France and make clear that he spent that time largely in the unoccupied zone in the south to avoid the occupiers. This book makes no mention of that as such, and the Lartigue of that time seems as insouciant as ever, which, under the circumstances, seems close to callousness.

There are a lot of pictures of the Liberation of Paris that give a Lartiguian sense of joy and none of Danger. There are a lot of pictures of Lartigue's son Dani, then twenty, at the station, going off to his 'youth camp'. The caption quotes his father as saying he was 'quite pleased' about his son's being drafted--'if his new existence doesn't teach him to wash himself better it will teach him, I hope, to sing and laugh'. But in another source, the book that Lartigue's widow, Florette, wrote about her husband, she quotes him in a different tone about his son's going to 'his stupid youth camp with the fear of being taken by the Germans'. Similarly, there is no information given about the end of his first marriage, to Madeleine 'Bibi' Messenger, the mother of his son. Whatever Lartigue may have felt at that moment, his instinct for happiness did not desert him. He soon found a beautiful companion in Renee Perle. A little more than a decade later, he mot a young France-Italian, Florette Ormea, twenty to his near-fifty. She became his wife in a happy relationship that lasted the rest of his life. Seeing these people in Lartigue's pictures made me curious to know more about them, but I had to look at other books to satisfy this curiosity. Which is not to say the photographs are not complete in themselves as aesthetic objects.