“France’s foremost amateur photographer” was what one rather perceptive magazine journalist called Jacques Henri Lartigue in 1952, in an article revealing to an unsuspecting public “the secret passion of a painter.” It was only in the following years that the already sixtyish Lartigue began practicing a bit of commissioned photojournalism. It would be another decade—before MoMA photography curator John Szarkowski discovered the old man as a “true primitive” for pictures he’d taken as a belle époque adolescent—for the first steps toward his canonization to take place.

What would Lartigue have been