Lartigue. Diary of a Century: Jacques Henri Lartigue. First edition.

Edited by Richard Avedon. Designed by Bea Feitler. Viking Press, A Studio Book. 1970. First edition. Brown cloth, lacks dust jacket. Slight tape stains where dust jacket protector (no longer present) was attached to book. Not to be confused with later reduced size reprints. This edition is 13.25 x 10.25 inches, beautifully bound and printed in gravure by C.J. Bucher, Switzerland. End papers are not illustrated as in another copy I have seen with the same information on back of title page. Listed in Roth's Book of 101 Photography Books and The Open Book as one of the great books of the 20th century. Summary:

Diary of a Century (published in 1970 by The Viking Press) is an iconic, large-format photographic autobiography by French photographer and painter Jacques Henri Lartigue. Conceived and edited by the legendary American fashion photographer Richard Avedon and beautifully structured by graphic designer Bea Feitler, this seminal book weaves together seventy years of Lartigue’s private memories, establishing his vast personal archive as one of the most comprehensive and joyous visual diaries of the 20th century.

Core Themes and Content

• A Seventy-Year Chronology of Happiness: The volume presents an expansive visual record spanning from 1901—when a seven-year-old Lartigue first began utilizing a camera—through the late 1960s. Rather than a formal historical survey, the book operates as a grand, curated family album, capturing a lifestyle defined by privilege, leisure, and an unwavering, lifelong optimism.

• The Interleaving of Text and Image: Moving beyond a standard photography monograph, the book heavily features translated excerpts and episodes directly from Lartigue's handwritten personal journals. This text provides intimate, witty context to his imagery, tracking his thoughts on his three marriages, his passionate love affair with Romanian beauty Renée Perle, and his quiet observations of a changing Europe.

• A Visual Who's Who of Culture: Interspersed among candid snapshots of family pranks and beach excursions are Lartigue’s casual, deeply human portraits of monumental 20th-century cultural figures. Readers encounter relaxed moments with Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Colette, Maurice Chevalier, Sacha Guitry, and even a young John F. Kennedy vacationing on the French Riviera in 1953.

• Avedon’s Editing and the Snapshot Aesthetic: In a poignant Afterword, Richard Avedon praises Lartigue as the most "deceptively simple and penetrating" photographer in the history of the medium. Avedon’s editing deliberately highlights Lartigue’s genius for catching the fleeting nature of everyday life, emphasizing the motion of early aviation and racing cars alongside the casual elegance of the French upper class.

By unifying private scrapbooks with public art, Diary of a Century serves as a foundational masterpiece of photographic bookmaking, cementing Lartigue’s legacy as a visual poet who transformed the act of personal memory-keeping into a profound historical document.

Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894–1986) was a celebrated French photographer and painter who is widely considered one of the 20th century's greatest visual chroniclers of motion, modernity, and the joie de vivre of the Belle Époque. Born into an extraordinarily wealthy, technologically progressive family outside Paris, Lartigue was gifted his first camera by his father at the age of six, embarking on a lifelong obsession with creating a massive, meticulously detailed diary of his life. Free from formal artistic training, the precocious boy instinctively mastered the capabilities of early hand cameras, pioneering a dynamic snapshot aesthetic that brilliantly captured his family’s eccentricities, early aviation experiments, racing automobiles, and the chic, elegant women of fashionable Parisian society. Though he considered painting his primary profession throughout most of his life, his massive personal archive of thousands of photographs remained virtually unknown until 1963, when John Szarkowski curated a landmark retrospective of his childhood work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This stunning, late-career rediscovery instantly elevated the 69-year-old Lartigue to international acclaim, cementing his reputation as an accidental genius of modern photography whose intuitive embrace of the fleeting, candid moment laid the conceptual groundwork for generations of future street photographers and photojournalists.