Lartigue, though having lived and worked in the infancy of the Modern Age, harkens back not to Victorian optimism, but to what M.H. Abrams called the Romantic “Natural Supernaturalism.” Within his photos, we glimpse creation in reverse, or the body pulled by its toes back into the emanating light from which it sprang. A woman is stopped, mid-summersault, as if to be rolled back to her girlhood. A boy is hooked by his heals mid-dive. A dog is launched across a ditch but has come to the end of the invisible rubberband to which he is attached. The creatures of Lartigue’s photographs verge on being jerked back to that original joy of the imagination before the act.
What it all comes down to is the miraculous response of the body to the human mind—an energy propelling nature’s cycle forward from origin to experience and back to origin. We leap and fall and spin over and over again because the joys of our bodies refuse stasis. We are not trees. We are not stones. We are what Wordsworth describes as “transitory Beings.”
Thanks to The Moonbeam Harvest.
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