13 June, Jacques Lartigue is born in Courbevoie, near Paris, in the home of his parents, Marie Haguet and Henri Lartigue. His older brother, Maurice, nicknamed "Zissou," was born on August 2, 1880. They are considered one of the wealthiest families in France.

Jacques Lartigue uses his father’s camera to take his first photos. He starts noting his thoughts and impressions on scraps of paper. This is the beginning of his diary.

Henri Lartigue gives Jacques his first camera : a 13x18 cm model with a manual shatter. The young boy takes and develops photographs on his own and starts pasting them into albums, the contents of which he later reorders. In all, he would leave put together 130 of these books.

The cameras given to him by his father are increasingly sophisticated, light and easy to handle. Now he can shoot anything, even in motion. He can also create a three-dimensional effect using a stereoscopic camera (in the years up to 1928, he takes some 5,000 stereoscopic pictures). He learns how to use multiple exposures and photographs “ghosts.”

Henri Lartigue buys the Château de Rouzat near Puy-de-Dôme. His two sons soon take to it as an ideal environment for their games and inventions.

Fascinated by flying machines, Jacques and his brother begin to make frequent trips to airfields. They witness the test flights of the first airplanes.

Thanks to Jacques’ membership card for the Ligue Aérienne, a club to which all the pilots of the day belong, he is able to photograph such notable early aviators as Garros, Latham, Paulhan, Lefèvre, Farman and Blériot.

During the course of his strolls in the Bois de Boulogne, Lartigue photographs the fashionable “élégantes.” He sells his first pictures, to the newspaper La Vie au Grand Air.

Lartigue acquires a new stereoscopic camera, a folding Nettel 6x13 which allows him to take panoramic views. His father gives him a Pathé film camera. The following year he sells his first sports films to a newsreel company.

In January, he photographs Santos-Dumont, Graham White and Max Linder at Saint-Moritz.

January: in Chamonix, he takes film footage and still photos of the brother of Ferdinand de Lesseps on his propeller-driven sled. August 3: Germany declares war on France. Jacques Lartigue is deferred from the draft for reasons of health.

Jacques Lartigue decides to become a painter and attends the Académie Jullian. He photographs Suzanne Lenglen, a 14 year-old tennis champion.

With his racing car (a Pic-Pic 16 HP), he volunteers his services to the military doctors at Paris hospitals.

May 19: he meets Madeleine Messager, whom he nicknames “Bibi.”

11 November: signing of the armistice. Many of the Lartigue family’s friends fall victim to the Spanish flu epidemic.

December 17: Jacques Lartigue marries Madeleine Messager. Her father, the composer André Messager, is a former director of the Opéra Comique in Paris, Covent Garden in London and the Paris Opera.