Jacques Henri Lartigue: Life in Colour

Artist: Jacques Henri Lartigue

Venue: MK Gallery

Location: Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

Dates: June 20 to October 4, 2026

Most people know Jacques Henri Lartigue for the black-and-white photographs that caught the energy and optimism of twentieth-century France. A new exhibition at MK Gallery asks visitors to set that familiar picture aside for a moment and look at a part of his work that has stayed in the background: his color photography.

Jacques Henri Lartigue: Life in Colour opens this summer with more than 150 works, many of them barely seen for decades even though they make up a large share of his archive.

Beyond the Images That Made Him Famous

Lartigue built his reputation on photographs of modern life in motion. Early aviation, motor racing, leisure, fashionable social circles, all of it caught with a spontaneity that made the pictures feel alive.

Those images placed him among the most influential photographers of the century. They also drew attention away from another side of his work. Well before color photography caught on, Lartigue was already testing the new technology and looking for fresh ways to record what he saw.

A Pioneer of Early Colour Photography

The exhibition looks closely at his use of the autochrome process, one of the first workable methods of color photography, developed by the Lumière brothers. The medium was difficult and far from common at the time. Lartigue used it to make luminous pictures that show his eye from a different angle.

Family gatherings, landscapes, travel scenes, and quiet portraits arrive here in full color, carrying the same attention to ordinary beauty and human connection that runs through all his work. They are the pictures of someone who kept experimenting and kept testing what photography could do.

An Archive Reconsidered

One of the show's real contributions is its attention to material that has gone mostly unseen. The color photographs are a sizable part of an archive that holds more than 100,000 images, built up over decades of looking.

Bringing these works forward widens the view of Lartigue beyond the famous frames that fixed his place in the history of photography. What emerges is a fuller portrait of an artist whose curiosity never settled into a single technique or style.

Tracing a Lifetime of Creativity

Along with the color photographs, the show gathers archival documents, vintage prints, stereoscopic images, and works on paper that track how his interests shifted over time.

From childhood drawings to fashion photography to the more experimental work of his later years, the picture is of someone whose relationship with image-making stayed restless. Rather than treating photography as a thing apart, the exhibition shows how closely his various pursuits were tied together.

Jacques Henri Lartigue, Paris, 1986. Photo by APB11, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

A Legacy of Observation and Joy

Lartigue's work still lands because it finds the wonder in ordinary moments. Travel, friendships, landscapes, the rhythms of cultural life, his photographs keep returning to movement, pleasure, and the way experience slips past.

Life in Colour adds to that legacy by showing that color was not a side experiment but a real part of how he worked. It is a chance to meet a familiar artist on new terms, and a reminder that even well-known figures can still surprise us when overlooked work comes back into view.

The exhibition runs from June 20 through October 4, 2026.

Website

mkgallery.org