Jacques henri lartigue

Will photography as an art form survive the age of Instagram? Now that we think we are all photographers, and curators and collectors too, constantly cropping, sifting, saving and storing, our sensibilities risk becoming blunted, and our attitudes blasé. Two new shows confirmed to me that galleries are going to have to be clever to maintain photography’s hard-won status. In Milton Keynes, the MK Gallery hosts a new retrospective of the photographer’s photographer, Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986).

What must it be like for an artist to achieve success only at the end of a long, relatively ignored career? The word ‘bittersweet’ seems particularly apt. Yet, late recognition is better, I suppose, than dying in oblivion like Vincent van Gogh, Franz Kafka or John Kennedy Toole. One of my favourite photographers, Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894–1986), did manage to savour the sweet smell of success in his old age. Lartigue’s late flowering was down to New York’s Museum of Modern Art and its then director of photography, John Szarkowski. There’s a very good argument to be made that during Szarkowski’s tenure at MoMA (1962–91) his shows transformed 20th-century photography.