The MK Gallery in England is dedicating an exhibition to Jacques Henri Lartigue that challenges his legendary status. Known for his black and white snapshots of the Belle Époque, the French photographer was also, throughout his life, a secretive colorist. "Life in Colour" unveils more than 150 prints that have long remained unseen.
We thought we knew everything about Lartigue (1894-1986): the wealthy boy from Courbevoie, the prodigious eye that, from childhood, captured the elegant women of the Bois de Boulogne, the first automobiles, the fragile airplanes. The poet of black and white, the bard of bourgeois joie de vivre and the nascent 20th century , who frequented Cocteau, Picasso, and Grace Kelly. His snapshots—the word was then unknown—broke with the stilted portraits of the time and foreshadowed what would later be called street photography. Yet, the Milton Keynes exhibition reveals another man, one who has remained in the shadows: the colorist.
The story is quite surprising. As a teenager in 1912, he took to the autochrome process, a fragile technique recently developed by the Lumière brothers. The interminable exposure times and cumbersome equipment discouraged him; he turned to painting, which he studied at the Académie Julian, and abandoned the autochrome in 1928. During the 1930s, painting absorbed him; he exhibited his work, dreaming of becoming a full-fledged artist, before photography regained its dominance after the war. Color photography wouldn't truly return until the advent of modern film in the 1950s. From these decades, he left behind intimate portraits – his wife Florette in Vence (1954), Silvana Empain (1961) – and images capturing the excitement of the Monaco Grand Prix (1956).
The most astonishing aspect lies in a single figure. His color photographs comprise a third of the 120,000 images in his collection, the JH Lartigue Donation, and most had never been exhibited. More than 150 works are brought together here: vintage prints, stereoscopic images, childhood drawings from the 1900s, forays into 1960s fashion, floral abstractions from the 1970s… A century of French life, captured by a man who tirelessly documented everything. No one had grasped the scope of this colorful side of his work, long considered minor. The exhibition, organized in collaboration with the Association of Friends of Jacques Henri Lartigue and the Ministry of Culture, feels like an exhumation.
For Lartigue was first and foremost an amateur, in the noblest sense: one who loves. Recognition came late. In the early 1960s, John Szarkowski, a master of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, discovered his work; the 1963 New York exhibition suddenly hailed him as a great photographer. Commissions from illustrated magazines, the Rapho agency, and the now-classic book, * Diary of a Century *, laid out by Bea Feitler under the direction of Richard Avedon, followed. At nearly 70, the man who had never earned a living from his art entered the pantheon of photography.
He has been hailed as the prophet of the snapshot, the forerunner of the spontaneous photography that social media has made commonplace. Color adds a nuance to this portrait: it renders its lightness more sensual, its skies more real, its nostalgia gentler. The MK Gallery, which has already unearthed works by Vivian Maier and Saul Leiter, has a taste for these kinds of revelations. At a time when everyone is photographing their lives in color, it reminds us that a French dandy did it, magnificently, before anyone else.
“Jacques Henri Lartigue: Life in Colour”
MK Gallery
900 Midsummer Boulevard, Milton Keynes (England)
Until 4 October 2026
