Lot Essay
Lartigue and Avedon were introduced to each other in 1966 by Hiro, the Japanese photographer who had his studio in the same building as Avedon in New York and who was good friends with Lartigue and Florette. Avedon had already become familiar with much of Lartigue's work from the latter's first one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1963. In his afterword to Lartigue's book Diary of a Century he writes: "I think Jacques Henri Lartigue is the most deceptively simple and penetrating photographer...While his predecessors and contemporaries were creating and serving traditions he did what no photographer has done before or since. He photographed his own life. It was as if he knew instinctively and from the very beginning that the real secrets lay in small things. And it was a kind of wisdom - so much deeper than training and so often perverted by it - that he never lost."