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Photography © Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication - France/AAJHL http://www.lartigue.org/us2/do... Portrait © Jeanloup Sieff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J... Henri Lartigue (1894 - 1986) was a French photographer and painter.Born in Courbevoie (a city outside of Paris) he is most famous for his stunning photos of automobile races, planes and fashionable Parisian women from the turn of the century.He started taking photos when he was 6, his subject matter being primarily his own life and the people and activities in it. Look at him in the bathtub at the age of 8, in "My Hydroglider with Propeller" http://www.masters-of-photogra... 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. He also photographed many famous sporting events, including automobile races such as the Coupe Gordon Bennett and the French Grand Prix, early flights by aviation pioneers including Gabriel Voisin, Louis Blériot, and Roland Garros, and tennis players such as Suzanne Lenglen at the French Open tennis championships.While he sold a few photographs in his youth, mainly to sporting magazines such as La Vie au Grand Air, in middle age he concentrated on his painting, and it was through this that he earned his living, although he maintained written and photographic journals throughout his life. Only when he was 69 were his boyhood photographs serendipitously discovered by Charles Rado of the Rapho agency, who introduced him to John Szarkowski, then curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who in turn arranged an exhibition of his work at the museum.By then as he received stints for fashion magazines, he was famous in other countries other than his native France, when until 1974 he was commissioned by the newly elected President of France Valéry Giscard d'Estaing to shoot an official portrait photograph. The result was a simple photo of him without the use of lighting utilising the national flag as a background. http://www.elysee.fr/elysee/ro... best known as a photographer, Lartigue was a capable if not especially gifted painter and showed in the official salons in Paris and in the south of France from 1922 on. He was friends with a wide selection of literary and artistic celebrities including the playwright Sacha Guitry, the singer Yvonne Printemps, the painters Kees van Dongen, Pablo Picasso and the artist-playwright-filmmaker Jean Cocteau. He also worked on the sets of the film-makers Jacques Feyder, Abel Gance, Robert Bresson, François Truffaut and Federico Fellini, and many of these celebrities became the subject of his photographs. Lartigue, however, photographed everyone he came in contact with, his most frequent muses being his three wives, and his mistress of the early 1930s, the Romanian model Renée Perle. http://www.geocities.com/parol... met his muse in 1930 on the Rue de la Pompe. He thought she was Mexican, "She is beautiful," Lartigue told his diary. "The small mouth with the full painted lips! The ebony black eyes. From under her fur coat comes a warmth of perfume. The head looks petite on her long neck." The pair spent two years together, cavorting as if on eternal vacation in Cannes, Juan-les-Pins, and Biarritz, with Lartigue's camera always at the ready. In the "shadowless heaven" of his photographs, glamorous women, including his first and second wives, Bibi and Florette, abound, but Perle's lacquered hair, slender silhouette, modern T-shirts, armfuls of bangles, and talonlike nails shone the brightest. "Around her," Lartigue wrote, "I see a halo of magic."In 1979, he donated his entire photographic œuvre to the French State, mandating the Association des Amis de Jacques Henri Lartigue, known as the Donation Jacques Henri Lartigue, to conserve and manage this collection, under the supervision of the French Ministry of Culture.

Channel: Education Uploaded: November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am Author: Cybelephotography

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