Featuring previously unpublished images and personal accounts, this book is an exploration of the early work of Jacques Henri Lartigue, one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated photographers.
One of the twentieth century’s most celebrated and prodigious photographers, Jacques Henri Lartigue captured the exuberance of Belle Époque Paris during his childhood. Lartigue focuses solely on the artist’s adolescence, featuring classic images of motor cars and high fashion alongside previously unpublished photographs from his archive.
On his eighth birthday, in 1902, Lartigue was given his first camera. By the next year, he was developing his own photographs. His handheld Kodak camera allowed the young photographer the flexibility to capture his eccentric family at home and document the social rituals of Paris’s upper echelons. He was the first artist to utilize the immediacy of the snapshot, often capturing his subjects mid- gesture, as in real life, creating a new visual language for the twentieth century. Through his work, he painted an intimate portrait of the social and cultural atmosphere of Paris before the outbreak of the First World War.
Author Louise Baring brings the artist’s early work to life through vivid historical accounts, as well as personal observations and memories from Lartigue’s childhood diaries. This book is a must-have for all fans of photography and twentieth-century French culture.
Lartigue: The Boy and the Belle Époque
Selected Books by This Photographer
Jacques Henri Lartigue: The Proof of Color
2024 - Atelier EXB Editions
Jacques Henri Lartigue, Kevin Moore, Marion Perceval
Jacques Henri Lartigue: The Invention of Happiness
2020 - Marsilio
Jacques Henri Lartigue, Denis Curti, Marion Perceval, Charles-Antoine Revol
Jacques Henri Lartigue, Photographer
1998 - Little, Brown & Company
Jacques Henri Lartigue, Vicki Goldberg
Books From the Same Publisher
Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography
2027 - Thames & Hudson
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford, Laura Wexler
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