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). Although on the weekday I visited it was empty as a tomb, the Insta generation would enjoy it; would probably recognise Lartigue as their kin, the first of their kind, a photo addict, who shot every day to archive the beauty he saw around him, and who, like a true millennial, said he struggled to remember anything unless he photographed it.
The final series moved me to tears. I stumbled out of the space aware that it had packed a huge punch
Lartigue was a sensitive boy born into privilege in the belle époque; as with Proust, you can feel in his work his lively, direct consciousness rubbing against the formality of his class and era. Lartigue’s father was, handily, the eighth richest man in France, and a keen amateur photographer too, who shared his cameras with his son. The young Lartigue enjoyed making 3D stereoscopes for his family’s entertainment (he was allowed to shoot 5,000 negatives!) and captured his brother Zissou’s madcap experiments with homemade prototype aeroplanes, gliders, go-carts, bicycle-boats, and so on. It all fed the films and imagination of Wes Anderson.
