Flipping through a book last night I came across a picture by Jacques-Henri Lartigue that I love. It is his first picture of his cousin Simone, who he’d go on to photograph for years. She is standing on a beach, grinning. Something is cupped in her hand (a sand crab? a fistful of gravel to hurl at the boy behind the camera?) and she is wearing what is now an utterly ridiculous bonnet (likely, though, the height of upper middle-class kid fashion in the early 1900s). A big wet dog stares at her. An adult, wading the shoals in the distance, ignores them.

The thing that strikes me about the image is the way Simone’s expression works to defy the “pastness” of the picture. Her outmoded clothes speak of her times, so do the color and quality of the image. Even the breed of dog places the image in the past (it’s something big but not a Labrador, the breed of the moment, at least in the U.S.). Her smile and gesture, on the other hand, belong to our time, or also to our time. She grins unconscious of a pose that might be appropriate to having one’s picture taken, unconscious in this moment of the photographic and physical conventions of her age. That expression bridges the gap between her and me. (It also helps that her seven year old cousin is equally unconscious of the conventions of photography as he takes this snapshot with his new camera.)

Many of Lartigue’s pictures connect in this way because many of them are family snapshots. He used his camera to record the light moments of family life, and so his photographs stand apart from the anonymous lot of old photographs by famous photographers. They also stand apart from a lot of old family photographs that depict the ancestors solemnly recording their existence for future generations.

Here’s Simone some years later:
 

 
And his brother Zissou:
 
 
His pet cat, Zizi, photographed when Lartigue was about seven years old:
 
 
And a man with his dog:
 
 
As I was thinking about Lartigue, I remembered that somewhere in On Photography Susan Sontag had complimented him. The way I’d remembered it, he was the only photographer anywhere among the 200 plus pages of that book to earn her approval. Alas:

Sontag only tolerates Lartigue because he trained his very offensive weapon, the camera, on his own people; and that not even by choice, but because as a kid he couldn’t travel much beyond the borders staked out by his own family. For Sontag, every photographer is the tourist who finds strangers bizarre and amusing, the tourist who never bothers to learn the local customs or get to know the people. Lartigue just gets off on a technicality.

I’ve written a little before about the popularity of news photos that depict strange bodies and tried to offer a more hopeful reading of the fascination with such images, a way of thinking about that fascination that doesn’t confine us to the baser levels of human nature.

This all is still more-or-less a thought in progress, but it seems that maybe that some of that particular fascination is working in Lartigue too. His pictures connect not only for the reason that the people in them manage still to look like real people, individuals with unique character rather than anonymous figures lost to the past, but also because he was interested in something that continues to be really compelling – the look of bodies that test convention and the look of bodies testing the limits of physical space.

No comments