Designer Agnès b. remembered a conversation she had with curator Martine d’Astier about Jacques Henri Lartigue twenty years ago. Today, she hosts an exhibition that offers a new understanding of the work of this photographer they both admire.
This exchange gives the opportunity of a very special exhibition, more than a third of the images exhibited have never been shown before, 145 of his most private photographs have been chosen and help answer frequent questions, pay tribute to Lartigue and to his models, and reveal the creative process of this precocious artist, who has produced a really unique body of works. “Since I was a child, I’ve been suffering from a kind of disease: all the things that I find wonderful tend to vanish, as my memory is not able to retain them long enough”, Lartigue writes in his journal in 1965.
Wonder and a failing memory, a passion for life and secret wounds caused by the impermanence of things: for 80 years, Lartigue captured and collected thousands of these fleeting moments to reveal their beauty. Holding back the passing of time by keeping these fragile moments, ready to disappear, it is first a narrative, the dream novel of his life. No speculation or intention about the effect to produce, taking pictures comes very naturally to this child prodigy. “I take plenty of silly pictures and my shadow-free heaven seems invulnerable to me… because something else in me is doing the rest.”
This exhibition provides an in-depth understanding of Lartigue’s approach by illustrating his most favourite themes: childhood, Bibi (his first wife), Dani (his only son), Renée Perle (one of his muses), Florette (his partner for about fifty years), Picasso (that Lartigue visited one day in his house in Cannes, taking about a hundred pictures of him), and “Myself” (self-portraits).
The exhibition will also present several pages from albums and a 3D projection of images selected among the 4,500 stereoscopic plates made by Lartigue between 1902 and 1928, announcing a feature- length film in preparation L’enfant des profondeurs, a slide show comprising 100 album pages (from 1902 to 1986); and the film Le bandit et la fée Améliot, that he shot with his family at the Château de Rouzat during the summer of 1914.
Martine d’Astier
Martine d’Astier is an author and curator specializing in photography. She has notably worked with Robert Delpire and Jacques Henri Lartigue starting 1981 and now manages his foundation.
An invitation to Martine d’Astier… To discover (or rediscover?) Jacques Henri Lartigue
November 10, 2017 to January 6, 2018
Galerie du jour Agnès b.
44 rue Quincampoix
75004 Paris
France
