ACCORDING TO a recent report in the Independent, "The 1995 edition of Social Trends demonstrates that household disposable income has increased in real terms by more than a third over the past 30 years. This week, just over a century after his birth, a Lartigue exhibition opens at the Royal Photographic Society in Bath. Despite the fact that he lived until 1986 - just in time to see digital imaging - and took up colour photography again in the Seventies, Lartigue's pictures will always be synonymous with the first quarter of the century. Some of Lartigue's funniest and most beautifully composed pictures are those, such as the one shown here, in which Zissou attempts to leave the ground in every winged contraption imaginable.In old age, it was another, then much more famous photographer, Richard Avedon, who, after discovering Lartigue in 1963, edited the book which would make his snapshots famous around the world: Lartigue's Diary of a Century. He came from a wealthy family which provided him with sufficient funds and much of his subject matter for most of his life.

He consigned every picture, titled and dated, to a series of albums; he kept a diary; and, most surprising, he made little sketches of what he had photographed each day."It was a sort of obsession," he explained much later, "to catch the passing moment," and so often this gave his pictures a special kind of poignancy. He loved to catch anything in motion - people, animals, cars, boats, planes - a passion for the new mechanical age he shared with the Italian Futurists. But the resulting pictures - with the soft-focus quality that came from the blur of motion - have much more in common with Impressionism, particularly as among his favourite subjects were the fashionably-dressed women in the Bois du Boulogne or at the racetrack with their billowing black striped dresses and little parasols.His older brother Maurice, nicknamed Zissou, seems to have spent much of his adolescence trying to fly. He graduated from umbrellas to box-kites to primitive gliders, taking off, with the help of his relations and to the astonishment of the locals, from the fields around the family chateau at Rouzat.

By 1927 he'd abandoned it. Lartigue was never a professional photographer. Then he moved on to a stereoscopic camera, which took two identical images that gave a 3-D effect when viewed through a stereoscope. By 1912 he had a Pathe 35mm cine camera, and by 1915 he was experimenting with colour. His first camera was "made of polished wood, with a lens extension of green cloth in accordion folds It has a tripod stand taller than I am. I have to climb on a stool to be able to use [it]." But by the age of eight, he'd got a better, smaller, quicker hand-plate camera that took several exposures in succession. He'd grown up alongside photography, and in 70 years he'd pretty much tried out every innovation as it came along.