The century's childhood

Who better to capture the century in its infancy than an infant prodigy, using a technology still in its relative infancy? Helped by his father, Jacques Henri Lartigue took his first photographs in 1900, when he was six. Two years later, his father gave him a camera and Lartigue began to take and develop photographs by himself. The young boy arranged pictures of his wealthy family in little albums and went on to experiment with ways, not only of preserving, but of enhancing images of his abundant happiness. By the age of 10 solely for his own amusement, he was producing the work of a precocious maturity which developed, seamlessly, into the classical poise and grace of his photographs of the 1920s and 1930s.

The pictures he made as a boy were not exhibited until the mid-1960s, when the director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, John Szarkowski, declared Lartigue to be the precursor of all that was alive and interesting during the middle of the 20th century. Not only that: Lartigue's glimpses of la belle epoque had, over time, become even more alluring. The devastation of two World Wars gave his childhood the look of a secular, immensely exciting Eden.

The excitement came, initially, from two sources: speed and flight. From the outset, Lartigue had enjoyed the camera's novel ability to stop time. Later, at Grand Prix meetings, he used his developing technical facility both to halt and convey the velocity of emergent modernity. The feeling contained in these pictures is best expressed by Colin Westerbeck in Street Photography: "It is as if, having got dressed that morning in the 19th century, [Lartigue's subjects] are racing now out of control into the 20th."

The immediacy of one image is such that the car seems to be crashing through the film which seeks to detain it. What the futurists strove to represent, Lartigue captured almost incidentally.

Like the futurists, he was fascinated by the conquest of the air initiated by Wilbur Wright's pioneering lift-off in 1908. France at this time was the winged nation par excellence and at numerous airshows, Lartigue photographed the sluggish dawn of flight. He'd used the camera to defy gravity, to freeze jumping people and dogs in mid-air; now he recorded the precarious historical moment when the principles of aeronautics were just managing to keep the available technology aloft (and vice-versa). It is as though the century itself is struggling to take wing. Again the power of these pictures - their temporal concentration - has increased with time. In them, the heavy sky of the past becomes scattered with flying machines, symbols of what a contemporary observer called "the great new future of the world".

With the onset of puberty, Lartigue's infatuation with speed was augmented by another object of adoration. In July 1907, he had "a new idea: that I should go to the park and photograph those women who have the most eccentric or beautiful hats". Within a year he declared: "everything about [women] fascinates me - their dresses, their scent, the way they walk, the make-up on their faces, their hands full of rings and, above all, their hats". Hardly surprising, then, that Lartigue went on to become what photographic historian Vicki Goldberg calls "the first fashion photographer". At once restrained and exuberant, Lartigue's pictures of women and their elegance define the twentieth century aesthetic of glamour - the stylisation of longing. The Riviera lifestyle celebrated by F. Scott Fitzgerald provided an anchorage for themes displayed with a compositional ease which anticipated the signature style of Cartier-Bresson.

By the time of his death in 1986, Lartigue had been canonised as a sublime recorder of happiness. In 1919, Lartigue met and married Madeleine Messager, whom he nicknamed Bibi. They divorced in 1931.Longer lasting is the strange, mournful quality of the husband's pictures of his wife.

There is only one person missing but, because of that, everywhere is empty: that is the default sentiment of much symbolist longing. In Lartigue's photographs the beloved is there, beautiful, pallid, alluring - but still the scene is desolate, dark, brooding. The London through which Bibi passes on the open top of an empty bus in 1926 is the unreal city - "under the brown fog of a winter dawn" - of Eliot's Wasteland. Every shop looks like an undertakers. The Riviera, in many of his pictures, is not the sundrenched idyll of the early sections of Tender is the Night; as often as not it is ravaged by weather as violent as the mental storms which engulf Nicole and blight her marriage to Dick Diver. Unlike Fitzgerald's hero, Lartigue kept his eye firmly averted from the carnage of the First World War but its associated technologies rumble through his frames. In a 1920s picture, Bibi, Lartigue and his grandmother look as if they have driven straight from the gas-shrouded wreckage of the Western Front.

The time lag between Lartigue's photographs being made and being shown has deepened their meaning. In at least one extraordinary instance it has, by association, been fundamentally changed.

A photograph from 1903 shows four people (Lartigue's brother and cousins) in Mardi Gras masks, facing the camera. Between 1969 and 1971 - at the same time Lartigue's work was becoming internationally venerated - Diane Arbus took some of her most disturbing photos, of the residents of various mental institutions. Several of the photographs show the inmates in Halloween masks; one shows four masked patients lined up in an uncanny compositional echo of Lartigue's boyish image.

A luxurious new book of Lartigue's photographs is prefaced with an epigraph from Marguerite Yourcenar: "All happiness is a kind of innocence". We are all attracted to the "extreme innocence" of Lartigue's pictures of his - and the century's - childhood, but the fact that this was the phrase used by Arbus to describe the attraction of her "retardates" casts a darkly enhancing shadow on the long summer depicted in them.

Jacques Henri Lartigue: Photographer by Vicki Goldberg, is published by Thames and Hudson (£45 sterling)

Geoff Dyer's most recent novel is Paris Trance (Abacus £9.99 sterling)