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| Jacques Henri Lartigue: The Photographic Century was at the Gallery of Photography, Dublin, January, 2000. |
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| Other articles by Nicholas Allen |
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| 1922, Aout Cambergrasse Concourse de Planeurs |
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| 1906, Juin Grand Prix De L'ACF. Circuit de la Sarthe |
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| The Playboy And The Camera |
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| The Jacques Henri Lartigue exhibition at the Gallery of Photography in Dublin occupied two floors, the photographs on show a record of over eighty years' achievement. Born in 1894, Lartigue was an obsessive photographer from before the age of ten. But Lartigue's parallel career as a painter predominated to the degree that the first major exhibition of his photographic work was not until 1963 in the New York Museum of Modern Art. Since then, Lartigue's photography has enjoyed consistent domestic popularity, the most recent evidence of this the use of his work by the French postal service in 1999. |
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| Lartigue himself was born into the highest echelon of French society, his various subjects evidence of the privileged status he enjoyed. It is difficult indeed to categorise Lartigue's work without reference to his caste. With no obvious dedication to theoretical concerns, Lartigue's work is, to a degree, a record of haute bourgeois compulsion. His images shift between racing cars and women, the stereotypical components of a playboy lifestyle. But there is an unerring wit about the images and, in the early work, a naive enthusiasm that is disarming of even the harshest critic's preconceptions. |
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| The first picture we saw of Lartigue in the Gallery was of the photographer as a boy with two female relatives in the Bois de Boulogne. No more than ten, the youth looks straight into the camera, confident and assured of his position. The wonderful My Racing Car Collection in My Bedroom, from 1905, further exhibits Lartigue's youthful verve. Taken from ground level, the photograph details Lartigue's favourite toys, aligned as if on a grid and ready, we might imagine, to race towards us. Exhibiting early evidence of Lartigue's theatrical flair in the staging of his photographs, the image is original in perspective and striking in its clarity. A masterpiece, indeed, from a child or adult. |
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| Lartigue's interest in cars dominates the Gallery exhibition, the forms and use of mechanical invention a constant delight to his work before 1930. From the juvenile celebration of his racing driver hero, Dursay, in 1905, to the investigation of automotive form in the thrilling Antibes Grand Prix of 1929, motor sport exercised the young photographer's technique and imagination. A ghostly image, the race at Antibes flits by in a dust-obscured glimpse of five cars in front of a crowd of hundreds. |
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| Mass observation was not always a main concern of Lartigue's mature work. By 1923's Self Portrait, the camera is rather involved in visual illusion, the image a picture of Lartigue painting a self-portrait, framed to his right by a mirror into which he stares. The canvas upon which Lartigue paints is definite in outline, but possessed only of an unfinished subject. The Lartigue present on canvas is split between head and body; the head finished and, we assume, coloured, the body in outline, spectral in the white trace of its foreground arm. There is no definite sense to the system of perception alluded to by Lartigue in this image, beyond the growing impression that revelation is the last object of his self-depiction. |
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| In contrast, Lartigue's skill as a fashion photographer is recognised in the Gallery's exhibition of some of his later commissions for Harper's Bazaar. The perfect aspects of the sun-drenched portraits of his partner Rene are excellent. The gorgeous Rene at Villard de Lens is classical in pose, its model a perfect figure, her face askance from the lens. Here the private becomes public in the image's stylised statement, the irony of course that Lartigue's record of his private life so reflects an increasing twentieth century pressure to brand lifestyle as a commodity. |
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| For all this, Lartigue's photography is curiously touching. The photographs of his family are engaging and witty, Lartigue's brother Ziszou a particular star of his younger brother's adoring images of racing carts and summer days by the river. Rarely will you leave an exhibition so amused and exhilarated as you will after viewing a Lartigue retrospective, the now lost vistas of early twentieth century Europe presented in their most attractive aspects. |
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| Nicholas Allen |
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