There is something quietly radical about seeing Jacques Henri Lartigue in colour. For decades, his reputation has rested on those buoyant black-and-white images of early 20th-century France: racing cars tilting forward, aeroplanes lifting off, friends caught mid-laugh. They feel unintentional, almost accidental.
Life in Colour focuses on a lesser-known strand of Lartigue’s work, bringing together more than 150 images that span his career, from drawings he made as a child in the 1900s and his early experimental stereoscopic images – which produce three-dimensional effects – to vintage prints, his work in the fashion world of the 1960s and his abstract floral photographs of the 1970s.
Lartigue was, by any definition, a prodigy. He received his first camera as a child and immediately began recording the world around him, not with documentary intent but with curiosity and play. His early images of movement remain among the most striking in photographic history. Racing cars appear stretched and elastic, their wheels skewed by speed. Figures leap, twist, and hover. Long before photography had settled into convention, Lartigue was testing what it could do.
That instinct carries through in this show. Even in colour, his eye remains tuned to spontaneity. The exhibition makes clear that his interest in movement was never just technical. It was emotional. Lartigue photographed the sensation of life in motion, whether in the mechanical thrill of a Monaco Grand Prix or the more intimate rhythm of a woman turning her head in sunlight.
L-R: Jacques Henri Lartigue, Florette Lartigue, Vence (1954). Jacques Henri Lartigue,
Silvana Empain (1961). Jacques Henri Lartigue, Monaco Grand Prix (1956) .
What is surprising is how early he began working with colour. Lartigue experimented with autochrome as a teenager, at a time when the process was cumbersome and rarely used. The results here are uneven but revealing. Some images feel tentative, restricted by long exposure times. Others, particularly portraits of family and friends, possess a softness that anticipates later developments in colour photography.
The exhibition also charts the long gap in which Lartigue turned primarily to painting, before returning to photography in the post-war years when colour processes became more practical. That shift is crucial. It explains why so much of this material has remained unseen. Colour was never central to the narrative built around him, despite a third of the 120,000 images in his archive.
There is, too, a social dimension. Lartigue moved within a rarefied world, photographing figures such as Jean Cocteau and Grace Kelly, but his images rarely feel formal or staged. He is often described as a pioneer of the ‘snapshot’, and the term holds. His photographs capture fleeting moments without the stiffness typical of the period, a quality that feels surprisingly contemporary.
If the exhibition has a weakness, it lies in its breadth. The inclusion of drawings, stereoscopic experiments, fashion work, and later abstract images risks diluting its focus. Yet it also reinforces the central point: Lartigue was never a single thing. Photographer, painter, diarist, observer. Always curious.
Seen together, these works suggest that colour was not an addition to his practice, but an extension of it. What changes is not the eye, but the palette. The same lightness, the same attention to fleeting detail, remains intact.
In the end, Life in Colour does not rewrite Lartigue’s legacy. It adjusts it. And in doing so, it brings him closer to the present than one might expect.
Henri Lartigue: Life in Colour
MK Gallery,
20 June – 4 October 2026
900 Midsummer Boulevard
Milton Keynes MK9 3QA
More information and tickets, HERE.
Author: Andrew Hildreth
Other exhibitions in the UK this summer recommended by I-M Inquisitive Minds include: Barbara Hepworth at the Courtauld Gallery, London; Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait at the National Portrait Gallery, London; and Serpentine Pavilion 2026 by LANZA Atelier, at The Serpentine, London.
Lead image: Jacques Henri Lartigue, Jacques and Florette Lartigue, Old Tucson (1962)
All images © Ministère de la Culture France / Association des Amis de Jacques Henri Lartigue.
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