I think Jacques Henri Lartigue is the most deceptively simple and penetrating photographer in the short ... embarrassing history of that so-called art. While his predecessors and contemporaries were creating and serving traditions he did what no photographer has done before or since. He photographed his own life. It was as if he knew instinctively and from the very beginning that the real secrets lay in small things. And it was a kind of wisdom— so much deeper than training and so often perverted by it— that he never lost. There is almost no one in this book who isn't a friend ... no moment that wasn't a private one. Lartigue never exhibited his pictures until 1962. He never thought of himself as a photographer. It was just something he did every day... every day for 70 years. Out of love of it. And every day his eye refined and his skill with a camera grew. He was an amateur ... never burdened by ambition or the need to be a serious person.