MK Gallery is presenting a major exhibition dedicated to the rarely seen colour photography of French artist and photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue, offering a fresh perspective on one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated image-makers.
Jacques Henri Lartigue: Life in Colour brings together more than 150 works spanning seven decades, focusing on a remarkable body of colour photographs that remained largely unseen for much of the artist’s life.
Best known for his iconic black-and-white images of Belle Époque France, glamorous social circles and the excitement of modern life, Lartigue is often celebrated as a pioneer of spontaneous photography. His images of motor racing, aviation, leisure and movement captured a rapidly changing world and anticipated the visual language of modern street photography by decades.
Yet colour photography formed a significant part of his practice from an early age. As a teenager, Lartigue began experimenting with autochrome, the pioneering colour process developed by the Lumière brothers. Working at a time when colour photography was technically challenging and rarely used, he created vivid images of family life, friends, landscapes and intimate moments that reveal a different side of his artistic vision.
Life in Colour explores this lesser-known aspect of Lartigue’s career, showcasing photographs that account for nearly 40 per cent of his archive of more than 100,000 images. Until recently, the vast majority of these works had never been publicly exhibited.
Alongside the colour photographs, the exhibition includes early stereoscopic images that create three-dimensional effects, vintage prints, archival documents and works on paper, tracing Lartigue’s creative journey from childhood drawings in the early 1900s to his fashion photography and experimental floral abstractions of the 1960s and 1970s.
Born in 1894 near Paris, Lartigue received his first camera from his father and began photographing as a child. While he later pursued painting professionally, studying at the Académie Julian in Paris, photography remained a constant presence throughout his life.
His international breakthrough came in 1963 when John Szarkowski, Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, organised a landmark exhibition of his work. The show established Lartigue as one of the great photographers of the twentieth century and introduced his extraordinary archive to a global audience.
Today, his photographs remain celebrated for their ability to capture joy, movement and the fleeting nature of everyday experience. Life in Colour expands that legacy, revealing an artist who was experimenting with colour decades before it became commonplace and whose curiosity about the possibilities of photography never diminished.
Jacques Henri Lartigue: Life in Colour, 20th June – 4th October 2026, MK Gallery
Jacques Henri Lartigue: Life in Colour is organised in collaboration with the Association des Amis de Jacques Henri Lartigue, the French Ministry of Culture and diChroma Photography.
