Jacques Henri Lartigue: Le Passé Composé

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 6x13 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.