Jacques Henri Lartigue and his camera

[tim atherton]

I wonder why we don't see more examples of this from that era of photography.
Regards
Bill

Do you mean this particular image? or Lartigues "style"?

Part of the reason why his particular images are so well known is because John Szarkowski and MoMA took his albums on wholesale and then promoted them to the world.

As for the racing car image, there are actually numerous examples of the same effect and look in the news magazines of the day, especially when they featured photographs of the newly popular sport of motor racing.

And for much of the rest of Lartigues work, as a youngster, along with his father, they were both part of a very active group of rich industrialist photographic amateurs who formed their own grouping and clubs - experimenting with both the technological/scientific and artistic aspects of photography (there were other distinct groups of photographers at the same time as well - the "Plein Air" group etc etc).

Until recently, not much research was done into these groups and movements in France, but in recent years, their archives and albums have been looked into more, and there are many other similar examples of the sort of artistic and technical experiments of the sort we have only seen more widely in the albums of Lartigue (and his father) - and which were treated up until recently by the photo historians as being essentially unique.

[Nathan Potter]

Splendid instructional thread Lindolfi. Many thanks. The period around 1912 particularly in Paris was intellectually hot with a lot of upper class money available to support art and intellectual pursuits. A lot of artistic innovation - post expressionist jumping into modernism - and I'm sure Lartigue was influenced by some of this. I rather thought that this image was an unexpected result for Lartigue though.

Nate Potter

[al olson]

For anyone who is interested, Photo Icons: The Story Behind the Pictures, 1827-1991 (no copyright), published by Taschen and edited by Hans-Michael Koetzle, has a nice little write-up of this image (pp 132-141).

[Bill L.]

Lindolfi...Marvelous!!

"he used a focal plane shutter of which the slit moved from top to bottom. In this way we see different moments in time projected on different parts of the film"

... is there anything like this floating around today... or does anyone know how to do a shutter hack to get this effect...this shutter is an absolute must have for me.

cheers, annie

Hi Annie,

Graflex made both the speed graphic cameras (make sure the "speed" part is there - that's the focal plane shutter series) and their RB series SLRs with focal plane shutters. I've never seen hard data on this, but while the RB Super D (a 4x5 SLR) shutter has a top speed of 1/1000th of a second, it does this by having a narrow slit, of which I've heard the transit time of the slit across the entire frame is about 1/5th of a second. Both types have shown up on this forum from time to time, and are reasonably common on that auction site (though, of course, buyer beware. . . ).

Cheers!
Bill

[Gordon Moat]

A slow shutter speed with panning can reproduce that effect on any horizontal focal plane shuttered camera. I have used this technique many times with various 35mm Nikon cameras. I would imagine a Speed Graphic could produce similar images.

Anyway, he is probably one of my favourite photographers of the past . . . not so much from a technology aspect, quite simply just because I enjoy viewing his images. What he shows well is the movement of like, and telling a story within a frame of film.

Ciao!

Gordon Moat Photography

[Annie M.]

Thanks ... now I can possibly cannibalize a speed graphic and mount the shutter behind my 240 on the 7x11 for a pan of the breakline... that is if it has a speed setting of +1 second... sorry for the detour off-topic.

[Struan Gray]

Bah Humbug. A good student would have worked out the car's decelleration using the residual distortion in the wheel.

[Lindolfi]

Thanks very much indeed for the interesting comments.

Struan Gray, the deformation of the wheel starting from a circle only consists of a difference in horizontal and vertical scaling and an additional horizontal skew. That means that no change in velocity of the car or of the camera panning angular velocity is needed to account for the shape of the wheel in the photograph, since there is no "residual distortion". Thanks for your input.

Mathematical fit of a skewed vertical ellipse to the white rim on the tire

[Patrik Roseen]

Thank you Lindolfi.

Having been amazed of this photograph I think that this is one of the most interesting topics I have seen on this forum for a long time!

[cowanw]

I wonder why the passengers side real wheel is not skewed?
Regards
Bill