Jacques Henri Lartigue

Lartigue was born the 13 juin 1894 into an upper-middle-class family in Courbevoie, near Paris. He began to photograph at age seven when he received his first camera, a large 13 x 18 cm affair on a wooden tripod, from his father, an amateur photographer himself. Upon receiving his first camera, he wrote: "Now I will be able to make portraits of everything ... everything. I know very well that many, many things are going to ask me to have their pictures taken, and I will take them all!" Photographing for his own innocent pleasure the varied day-to-day activities of his family and friends, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, a child prodigy of the camera, captured the excitements and fragile beauties of La Belle Epoque at the beginning of the century with a striking freshness and authenticity. Richard Avedon has called Lartigue "the most deceptively simple and penetrating photographer in the history ... of that art".
It dead at Nice the 12 september 1986.