There's a particular jolt that comes from seeing color in old photographs, a feeling that black and white, however beautiful, never quite gives you. It's the difference between knowing the past happened and feeling like you could walk into it. MK Gallery's new exhibition, Jacques Henri Lartigue: Life in Color, provides that jolt in spades. And for photographers who spend their working lives thinking about light, tone and the gap between a record and a memory, it's well worth paying attention.
Born in Paris, Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986) is best known for his black-and-white work: elegant, playful images of Belle Époque Paris, motor racing, aviation and the French Riviera set. He moved in a social circle that included Jean Cocteau, Grace Kelly and Pablo Picasso, and he's widely credited as a pioneer of the unposed, spontaneous snapshot.
What's far less known is that around a third of his preserved images were shot in color, and the bulk of that work, representing nearly 40% of his 100,000-image archive, has barely been seen until now.
This show puts that material front and centre, with over 150 works spanning his earliest experiments as a teenager through to fashion-world commissions in the 1960s and abstract floral studies in the 1970s. And the effect of seeing it together is less academic and more visceral than it sounds.
Startling intimacy
Lartigue first picked up autochrome, an early color process developed by the Lumière brothers, in 1912, and his earliest color pictures of family and friends have a startling, almost contemporary intimacy.
A striped tablecloth, a red and white curtain, a child's headscarf all read as color does today: specific, warm, slightly imperfect. Strip the same scene back to gray tones and it slides instantly into a section of your brain tagged "history". Leave the color in, and it feels closer to a memory you didn't know you had.
At the risk of stating the obvious, color carries information that monochrome discards: the exact pink of a hibiscus floating in a swimming pool, the red and white canopy of a parachute against Mediterranean sky, the warm orange of a sun-faded jacket. Lartigue understood this instinctively, decades before it became fashionable, or even technically straightforward, to think this way.
A lesson in patience
For today's photographers – used to easy, instant color – there's something humbling in remembering what this approach cost Lartigue. Gruelling exposure times running into several seconds, equipment that fought against spontaneity, and a process he eventually abandoned for nearly two decades before color photography became practical enough to suit his way of working. He kept at it anyway, on and off, for over 60 years.
The reward for that persistence is on the walls at MK Gallery now: a body of work that seems less like an archive, more like a window onto past time. If you've ever tried to capture a fleeting moment of family life, a beach afternoon or the specific quality of evening light on a river, you'll recognise exactly what Lartigue was chasing. And you're likely to come away from this show seeing your own color work a little differently.
Jacques Henri Lartigue: Life in Color runs at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, UK, until 4 October. Admission from free to £15.95.
