This is a popular photograph entitled “Race Car”, taken by photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue, in which we see a race car skewed in one direction, and the spectators skewed in the opposite. It is a black and white photo taken using a large format camera, sometime in the early 20th century.
The standing question about this image is wondering whether or not Jacques-Henri Lartigue purposely wanted his image to look distorted like this. While we’ll never know, I think he knew exactly what he was doing, and vaguely what kind of result it would give. The reason for the huge distortion in the photograph can be explained in a pretty simple way. Seeing as he was using a large format camera (bigger area to expose the film would take more time) and the fact that the shutter on his camera exposed one half of the image before the other explains it all.
While it isn’t the same kind of panning that we see today, it gives the overall look to the image a quirky, weird kind of feel that you can’t seem to replicate with modern-day digital images. No matter how hard you’d try, it would be nearly impossible to recreate a photo similar looking to this one.
Considering the kind of images people were taking at the time, mainly being serious portraits and landscapes, it really is nice to see the other aspects of photography that were being done. While you could potentially call this photograph “technically incorrect”, I think it has a very lovely look, and it really is refreshing to see the beginnings of some areas of photography (such as auto racing) that are very popular today.
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