This Side of Paradise.(The life of photographer Jacques Lartigue)(Biography)

In 1962, an unknown 68-year-old French photographer named Jacques Lartigue and his wife, Florette, took their first trip to the United States. While in New York, Florette showed some of her husband's prints to Charles Rado, a former photo agent. Rado was knocked out by what he saw: sharp, stylish pictures of the rich and beautiful at play on the French Riviera during the '20s and '30s. He took the pictures to Life magazine and the Museum of Modern Art; the following year, MoMA mounted Lartigue's first one-man show and Life published 12 pages of his photos. "They seemed--like a fine athlete--to make their point with economy, elegance, and an easy precision," wrote John Szarkowski, Life's photography director at the time. "It seemed I might be looking at the early undiscovered work of [Henri] Cartier-Bresson's papa."

High praise, indeed. Born in 1894 to a wealthy haut bourgeois family, Lartigue received his first real camera from his father--a railroad baron, banker and publisher--when he was 7. He dedicated himself to learning the intricacies of photography, printing his own pictures and pasting them neatly in albums. Some 100 prints and 130 albums are now on display in "Jacques Henri Lartigue 1894- 1986: The Album of a Life," at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (through Sept. 22).

Lartigue snapped the world around him: the Belle Epoque dames strolling in their bustles and plumed chapeaus; man's first attempts to fly airplanes; motorcar races through the French countryside; tennis players in midvolley at the Davis Cup. His images are so full of movement and joviality that you can feel the hope and wealth that sprang from the Industrial Revolution. "I was born happy," he once said. "It helps, you know."

Then came the Great War. Rejected by the military because he was too skinny, Lartigue watched the war through his lens: a friend in a new uniform, a soldier driving a snazzy car. In 1919 he married Madeleine Messager, and they moved from Paris to the French Riviera. He and Bibi- -as he called his wife--and their son, Dani, passed their afternoons ...