Polka is pleased to continue displaying some of its archives. LARTIGUE again, this time in Colors, pictures chosen from an exhibition that took place in 2018 : Mémoire en couleurs

From Paris to Chamonix or from Biarritz to Cannes, the work of Jacques Henri Lartigue reads like an album of photographs of his own world: «These are not the thoughts that I would like to trap, but the smell of my happiness. It’s wonderful, wonderful. Nothing could be so funny. I’m going to photograph everything, absolutely everything.” Lartigue bites life, and pretty women, full teeth. His muses are called Bibi, his first wife, Renée, magnificent model of Romanian origin, Coco, then Florette who will accompany him during the last forty years of his life, summarized, compiled, annotated in his famous albums—there are a hundred of them—that document France’s first steps in the modern world. It was only in the 1950s that the photographer’s career grew, with publications in renowned magazines and a major exhibition at MoMa in 1963 at the initiative of John Szarkowski. Lartigue becomes in the United States, the famous French photographer. The iconic New York curator will say, "Lartigue’s influence has not been overwhelming in photography. It was only one day that all that the great masters had discovered through sophisticated research, a child had known intuitively around 1900.” A «child» who without ever giving up black and white, was interested in the mysteries of color at two moments of his life. During his youth, from 1912 to 1927, on autochrome… plate. , and from 1949 in Ekatchrome, process on film that he adopts and uses until his death in 1986. “For me, life and colour are inseparable. . . . I have always been a painter. It is with my painter’s eye that I see everything.”