Lartigue: The Boy and the Belle Epoque

At a young age Lartigue mastered the medium of photography: this explorationof his extraordinary childhood is interwoven with a social and cultural portrait of theBelle Époque. Bonnard and Vuillard used the camera as a reference point for painting,Eugène Atget documented the architecture of the old Paris ahead of its developers, butLartigue was the first to harness the immediacy of the snapshot, often capturing hissubjects mid-gesture as in real life, creating a new visual language for the 20th century.