And So We Dive! Living Like Lartigue

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.