“In Carriage Day at the Races at Auteuil, Lartigue reveals this spectacle of the dazzling display. In the image, the three hats appear exotic as if they are carefully groomed tropical birds partially obscuring all three of the women’s faces but not their emotions. Stripes accentuate the womanly figures while balancing the unstaged photograph.”
The extravagant women are seemingly enjoying a different type of spectacle while Lartigue looks on at their own self-made one. Encapsulating not only the fashion of an era, but the era itself, the nostalgic image lends itself to what Lartigue called a “fairy-like epoch.” So much so that in the 1960s when Lartigue’s previously unknown photographs were finally made public, Cecil Beaton drew on this image for his costume designs for My Fair Lady.
Known for dynamic photographs of car races and fashionable ladies strolling along Parisian promenades, Jacques-Henri Lartigue made a decisive departure from the stiff formality that characterized early photography to capture joyful, carefree scenes of bourgeois leisure. Lartigue’s work was largely underappreciated until 1963, when the Museum of Modern Art presented an exhibition of his photographs that drew the attention of Richard Avedon. Born into affluence, Lartigue documented the excitement of the final years of the Belle Epoque with a gimlet eye, taking candid photos of his daredevil brother Zissou’s glider mishaps, a cousin tumbling off a homemade scooter, and fearless jumps off high walls. A society photographer from the 1920s through the ’60s, he shot rich, beautiful vacationers on the French Riviera and beyond. His informal sensibility and use of blur and movement prefigured the snapshot aesthetic of later photographers like Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander.