What inspires a novelist to co-curate a show on Jacques Henri lartigue? William Boyd talks snapshots and stories with Claire Holland.
Jacques Henri Lartigue took photographs for almost five decades but he thought of himself primarily as a painter until, at the age of 69, his reputation as a photographer was established by a show at MoMA in New York in 1963.
Lartigue was given a camera at the age of seven. Although he never saw it as a toy, the process of making pictures held for him an essential element of play from the outset. He became renowned for his dynamic black-and-white photographs of car races, aeroplanes, people and animals in motion and vivacious snapshots of friends and family — a portrait of turn-of-the-century France as it appeared to a fun-loving boy. Later, as a teenager, he went on to capture with the same humour the elegant ladies parading on Paris’s Avenue de Bois and at the racetrack. For Lartigue, the snapshot became a perfect medium to capture the fun and excitement of his daily life.
