Jacques Henri Lartigue: Le Passé Composé
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Grand Prix de la Baule, 1929
© Jacques Henri Lartigue
Apparently panoramic images are on someone else’s mind this week as well, as today’s post over at Mrs. Deane considers the 6×13 panoramic work of French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986), from his book Le Passé Composé.
Lartigue started photographing at a very young age and although he later sold a few of his pictures to the press and exhibited at the Galerie d’Orsay alongside Brassaï, Man Ray and Doisneau, his reputation as a photographer was not truly established until he was much older. Only when he was 69 were his boyhood photographs serendipitously discovered by Charles Rado of the Rapho agency, who introduced him to John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Szarkowski showed his work as a retrospective at MoMA (The Photographs of Jacques Henri Lartigue) and he also had a portfolio published in Life, establishing him as an outstanding photographer of the time. Lartigue is most famous for his photographs of automobile races, planes, and fashionable Parisian women from the turn of the century. But, I love these panoramics of his.
Fun fact (via Wikipedia):
American director Wes Anderson is a fan of Lartigue’s work, and has referenced it in his films. A shot in Rushmore is based on one of his photographs, and Lartigue’s likeness was the basis for the portrait of Lord Mandrake in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
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March 25th, 2007 at 7:52 am
Hi Shane,
I thought you’d like those images! ;-)
BTW The image in your post is not in the book. Where’d ya find it?
March 25th, 2007 at 8:41 am
Found it on artnet—it was one of the only images I could find that you didn’t already post. It’s hard to find the panoramas online with title information.
March 25th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
Also, the dude in that picture is named Zissou. Latrigue took lots of pictures of him, they were brothers! This is the one that I always think of. Who needs the wikipedia when there is Greg Wasserstrom?
March 25th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
I wasn’t aware Zissou was his brother! Haha—thanks Greg.
March 26th, 2007 at 4:11 am
Actually, I thought it was his son Dani. In 1929 his brother would be grown up and should be taller. In the panorama book, all work when Lartigue was married, there are many pics of his son Dani, like the one I posted. Zissou is in much of the earlier work, though, so the confusion is understandable.