Review: Master Photographers: Jacques-Henri Lartigue, BBC, 1983

In episode four we meet our first non-German photographer, a citizen of France who for most of his life was not known as a photographer at all, but as a painter.  He had the good fortune of being born into a wealthy family and took his first photo in 1901, when he was only seven and when cameras were rare and expensive equipment.  During the interview he shows off some of his cameras and discusses his love for racing cars and aeroplanes, toys of the privileged in an age when the majority still worked on farms or in factories.  Lartigue even had his own darkroom, perhaps the only child in France to have had one.   Many of his most well-known photographs are those taken during his childhood and young adult years capturing the lives of the Parisian rich at the turn of the 20th century.  

The interviewer asks a number of interesting questions to draw out Lartigue’s perspective on photography as process and art.  He reveals an obsession with capturing and preserving time.  This is obvious from the number of large photo albums he began creating as a child (and which he shows us in the film) to the meticulous note keeping of his diaries. But for all the work that goes into creating them, he says he rarely views his own work.  He compares himself to a cook who makes jam but prefers fresh fruit.

His work approach was to simply be with his camera, to let subjects find him, to photograph with whatever nature provided.  He most always shot with natural light and expresses a dislike of artificial (even though the film begins with him in a well-lit studio shooting the state ballet company’s prima ballerina).   In his street photography he never asked subjects for permission and believes the decisive moment is something to be anticipated, but that like a tennis volley, you return instinctually, without thinking.  He worked quickly and confidently, taking only 3-4 exposures per image.  Lartigue says photography represents the details of reality but that reality itself is too beautiful and too elusive to be captured [in it’s entirety, I presume he means to say].  

One of his habits is particularly intriguing.  In his diaries he would sketch the photos that he shot.  This was in an age where photographic images might not be available until days after they were taken.  I wonder if this might not be a useful practice for modern students as a means of getting them to visually conceptualize what they are trying to achieve, of thinking of a photo as a composition and not just a set of of hundreds of images rattled off in hopes of catching something usable.  

Having grown up protected from the worst of human toil and suffering, Lartique seems to have been able to preserve in himself a love for lightness, optimism and beauty. But still he worries about the future, about his legacy.  Besides his obsession with preserving and recording the present, he takes photos, he says, to live on through the pictures.  

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