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burnedshoes:

#1: © Jacques-Henri Lartigue, ca. 1912-1913, Cousin Simone Roussel
#2: Book ‘Diary of a Century’ by Jacques-Henri Lartigue, The Viking Press, 1970
#3: © Phillips de Pury & Company, 1966-1968, Jacques-Henri Lartigue and Richard Avedon
#4: © Jacques-Henri Lartigue, ca. 1912-1913, Cousin Simone Roussel

Jacques-Henri Lartigue started taking photos when he was 7, his subject matter being primarily his own life and the people and activities in it. As a child he photographed his friends and family at play – running and jumping, racing wheeled soap boxes, building kites, gliders and aeroplanes, climbing the Eiffel Tower and so on.

His first book, Diary of a Century was published in collaboration with Richard Avedon, and from then on innumerable books and exhibitions throughout the world have featured Lartigue’s photographs.

“I think Jacques Henri Lartigue is the most deceptively simple and penetrating photographer in the short … embarrassing history of that so-called art. While his predecessors and contemporaries were creating and serving traditions he did what no photographer has done before or since. He photographed his own life. It was as if he knew instinctively and from the very beginning that the real secrets lay in small things. And it was a kind of wisdom-so much deeper than training and so often perverted by it-that he never lost. There is almost no one in this book who isn’t a friend … no moment that wasn’t private one.” (Richard Avedon, Text from “He has shown us laughter”, preface to an out of print catalog from a Japanese exhibition of Lartigue’s work)