Jacques Henri Lartigue

French painter and photographer Jacques Lartigue was born into a wealthy family and was given a Brownie camera when he was seven. From the early beginning he did informal shots of everyday subjects. He enthusiastically photographed automobile races, fashionable ladies at the seashore and the park, and kite flying. In 1912 he succeeded in photographing a passing race car, which is among the earliest photo snapshots in the world. His photographs reveal his free spirit and love of life, rather than a concern for photographic technique and craft, and often captured a sense of movement.

When his work was discovered in the 1960s it was first acclaimed for its departure from formal, posed portraits and for its ingenuous charm and beguiling spontaneity. His pictures were firstly published in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Lartigue actually studied painting at the Academie Julian in Paris, but was only moderately successful as a painter and later gave it up in favor of photography. Although there are well-known photographs from the 1920s by Lartigue of the motifs (boxing, hurdling) of the submitted pictures, it is unlikely that he was allowed to submit these. For the “110 m hurdles” there is a note in the catalog that it was a sketch.