Description:
At 40 Rue Cortambert. At the age of 11, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, took a photograph of his cousin Bichonnade leaping off his parents’ terrace in Paris. Seventy-six years later Loengard asked Lartigue to return to that spot, where Lartigue enjoyed a game of inner tube tossing. Lartigue was born in Courbevoie, France on June 13, 1894. He took his first photograph at the age of six, using his father’s camera, and started keeping what would become a lifelong diary. In 1904 he began making photographs and drawings of family games and childhood experiences, also capturing the beginnings of aviation and cars and the smart women of the Bois de Boulogne as well as society and sporting events. Painting was Lartigue's primary professional activity, and in 1915 he attended the Académie Jullian: and from 1922 onwards he exhibited his paintings in the salons of Paris and southern France. Although Lartigue occasionally sold his photographs 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 69, with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the publication of a portfolio in LIFE magazine. Worldwide fame came three years later with his first book, "The Family Album," followed in 1970, by "Diary of a Century," conceived by Richard Avedon.