The Olympic Games provide an opportunity to pay tribute to Jacques Henri Lartigue, photographer of the art of outdoor living, with a major exhibition at Galerie Polka. Spotlight!

THE BIRTH OF A PHOTOGRAPHER

French painter, writer and photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue was born at the end of the 19th century. From an early age, his father introduced him to photography. Armed with his first camera at the age of 6, he never stopped photographing his childhood life, which was punctuated by car journeys and family vacations. Curious about all the new photographic techniques, he soon began to experiment with color photography, using the autochrome process, and with relief photography. In 1963, at the age of 69, Lartigue exhibited his work for the first time at MoMA in New York. That same year, Life magazine devoted a portfolio to him, in the same issue as the one announcing the death of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. His images travelled the world, establishing him overnight as one of the great names in twentieth-century photography. In 1979, Jacques Henri Lartigue donated his prolific body of work to the French government, entrusting the Donation Jacques Henri Lartigue with the task of preserving, promoting and distributing the 120,000 photographs he had taken throughout his life...

IN THE WORLD OF JACQUES HENRI LARTIGUE

A scion of the Belle Époque, Jacques Henri Lartigue has gone down in history as a witness to a bygone era. Through his lens, the photographer immortalized members of his family as well as society in its incessant social parade, the early days of aviation, car rallies in Auvergne, bathers in Deauville and Biarritz, and winter sports in Switzerland. A genius of black and white, his shots of subjects in motion depict a youth so idyllic it seems almost unreal. A succession of small, everyday pleasures, the artist's works are like paintings frozen in time. In his memoirs, the man who was a painter before becoming a photographer claims: "It's with my painter's eye that I see everything. Halfway between visual culture and art photography, his photographs are as poetic as they are charming, like a window on 20th-century France. A lovely way to explore all the themes dear to the artist, such as the fleetingness of the passing moment, the brevity of happiness and the fragility of life!

ANOTHER IDEA OF SPORT

From the Belle Époque to the 1980s, Jacques Henri Lartigue photographed literally everything that moved. Tennis matches, ball or rowing events, beach games, ski, snow or water fun, car races: while the artist had no particular sporting practice, his aim was to define an ideal of sport, whatever it might be, as an art of living. There are few images showing bodies in full exertion. No sweat, no suffering. In his black-and-white shots, the photographer reveals players frozen in movement, retranscribing the moments of adrenalin and fulfillment provided by physical activity recognized as a continuum of pleasures.

With the Paris 2024 Olympics just a few weeks away, Galerie Polka presents the work of this photographer of instantaneity. Through a selection of prints on the theme of sport, the exhibition is both a tribute to Jacques Henri Lartigue's innovative aesthetic and a precious testimony to the practice of sport in the early 20th century. A time when sport was practiced in civilian clothes, but always with the same beauty of gesture...

"DIVINEMENT SPORT" GALERIE POLKA
12, RUE SAINT-GILLES, PARIS 3E
FROM AUGUST 29 TO SEPTEMBER 7, 2024
POLKAGALERIE.COM