I have a deep, and admittedly complicated, love of vernacular photography—that quixotic genre where aptitude just isn’t that important and the end goal is not fine art but a tangible link to a specific feeling or memory. Vernacular belongs in the realm of the amateur (another loaded term). It’s intimate. It’s also nearly always imperfect, and that’s why I’m drawn to it. In a way that fine art can’t, vernacular photography makes us feel a part of the process as if we could have been the ones holding the camera, or in front of it for that matter. As if these could be our own memories. Family photo albums like this one are quintessentially vernacular; not just in the photographic images, but also in way the photos were arranged, the album itself crafted.
Sometimes, though, vernacular photography reaches across the
snapshot divide and something intuitive and spontaneous is born. And this album, this very page of this
album, demonstrates this beautifully. It lives and breathes the spirit of Lartigue. Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986)
was a child of eight when he first took up the camera, but it wasn’t until the
1960s that his work was “discovered” and exhibited. Lartigue led a
free-wheeling life of privilege in turn of the century France, not unlike many
of the old families of Bermuda, minus the island of course. His images,
sometimes orchestrated, other times serendipitous, include all of the things
that fascinate young boys (and let’s face it, the rest of us too): leaping and
levitating, auto racing and airplanes, voyeurism, and sport. Like many
snapshooters in those early years of personal and portable photography,
Lartigue marveled at the camera’s novelty and its ability to capture the world
just how he saw it, as well as its capacity to manipulate perspective and
motion.
Jacques Henri Lartigue. Suzy Vernon, Royan, September 1926.
Jacques Henri Lartigue. Championnat du monde de saut à ski, Juan-les-Pins,1938.
Jacques Henri Lartigue. Entrainement de Suzanne Lenglen, 1915
Jacques Henri Lartigue. Bichonnade, 40, Rue Cortambert, Paris, 1905.
“Various Dives” is a page from a family album created around
1911, and depicts aspects of everyday life in the Butterfield family of Bermuda,
and is among many treasures from the Masterworks archive. This page of
snapshots, with its elegant non sequitur formations, doesn’t just document moments
of a Bermuda summer afternoon, it projects the same exuberant vitality of the
era so elegantly captured by Lartigue. It sings out: look what we can do, look
at our youth, our life! Look at how innocent we were before the wars, how we
opened up our lives to take it all in. Look at our recklessness. Look how we
made time stand still.
Butterfield Family Album, c. 1911.
