Jacques Henri Lartigue (June 13, 1894 -- September 12, 1986) was a French photographer and painter, known for his photographs of automobile races, planes and Parisian fashion female models. While he sold a few photographs to sporting magazines such as La Vie au Grand Air, during his middle-ages he concentrated on painting which also was his source of income and living. However, he continued taking photographs and maintained written journals about them throughout his life. At age of 69 his boyhood photographs were 'discovered' by Charles Rado of the Rapho agency who introduced Lartigue to John Szarkowski, curator of the Museum of Modern Art, who arranged an exhibition of his work at the museum. Life magazine published the photos in 1963.
This exhibition gained him fame and exposure to the industry. He then got opportunities to work with several fashion magazines and became famous in other countries as well. In 1974 he was commissioned by the newly elected President of France Valéry Giscard d'Estaing to shoot his official portrait. The result was a simple photo, simple lit, using the national flag as a background He was rewarded with his first French retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs the following year, which paved way for more commissions from fashion and decoration magazines. Although best known as a photographer, Lartigue was also a good painter. He often showed-up in the official salons in Paris and in the south of France from 1922. 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 were his three wives, and his mistress of the early 1930s, the Romanian model Renée Perle...