Jacques-Henri Lartigue

"1913. Jacques Henri Lartigue was only nineteen years old when he spent his first winter vacation in the Alps. Immediately captivated, he became a frequent visitor to the increasingly fashionable resorts of Chamonix, Megeve, and Saint Moritz. The photographs that he took there are full of the adolescent wonderment that he was to maintain all his life." "He photographed all the fun and glamour of European high-society at play in the snow - intrepid sportsmen and women in action, displaying their athletic prowess at skiing, ice hockey, skating, curling, bobsleigh... His pictures propel us between sky and land: skaters twirl, skiers jump, fir trees sway. But the mountains also harbor more contemplative, personal moments: his honeymoon with his young wife Bibi at Chamonix; skiing through "silence as soft as down"; the quiet poetry of a winter landscape." "Beautifully reproduced in duo-tone, this collection of winter photographs, the majority of which are published here for the first time, reiterate Lartigue's position as one of the great masters of twentieth-century photography."

"Jacques Henri Lartique(1894-1986) received his first camera in 1902 and soon began to fill album after album with photographs of family and friends. He went on to capture the world on film, but always recorded what fascinated him most : people in motion and objects in flight. The 63 photographs collected here -- of car and bicycle races, early aeroplanes, enormous kites and, of course, his family -- radiate the intimacy and sheer exuberance he brought to his art." -- Inside front cover.

Photographs and excerpts from the author's diary.