A sporting life - Edition en langue anglaise

This book, wich celebrates the annual theme chosen by the house of hermès for 2015, is the first publication to focus exclusively on Jacques Henri Lartigue's output of photographs about sport. A fascinated observer of its emergence during the first thirty years of the century, and a passionate participant in many of its discipline, Jacques Henri Lartigue and his "eye-trap" left an unforgettable record of the mad fun of play, of sporting elegance, of the heady exhiliration of the body in motion, and of the endless technical, gestural and sartorial inventiveness of these new corporal practices, which also profoundly trasnformed relation between men, women and children.

The images are grouped according to five themes - "The sportsman", "Getting some air", "Training", "Women and children", "Spectacle and spectators" - which give historian Thierry Terret ample scope to bring out all the richness of this aspect of the photographer's work while analysing the gradual emergence of sport as a major part of modern life, and the questions it raises. Finally, novelist Anne-Marie Garat, in whose fiction photography, and especially family photography, plays a key part, offers her vision of this ensemble in a preface that is as learned as it is inspired.

Bringing out both the emotional and aesthetic dimensions of sport, she emphasises its role in the development of photography itself.