While there is no evidence that Lautrec ever owned a camera, his relationship with the art of photography is profound. After all, it is only natural that Lautrec, an artist of modernity, would be drawn to one of the most modern media in existence at the end of the nineteenth century, invented only a few decades earlier. Photography would become fundamental to Lautrec, both artistically and personally. Toulouse-Lautrec had a profoundly photographic eye, like no other artist of his time period. His works would have been inconceivable without photography.His compositions strongly suggest the influence of the medium, which at the time was used more for documentary than artistic purposes. Scenes like dances in Montmartre clubs, the acrobatics of tightrope walkers, and crowded bars are all captured by Lautrec as true snapshots, evidence of a fleeting moment that the artist immortalizes and reproduces in all its spontaneity. His compositions with almost truncated and cut-off figures, as well as their sketched, unfinished style, are intrinsically linked to photography, as are their tight angles. Lautrec was also friends with many photographers (including François Cauzi, Maurice Guibert and Paul Sescau), whom he frequently tasked with taking pictures for him. Sometimes he went on to use their pictures as models, copying their forms and including them in his own work, other times he used them as documentation of theatrical performances. Lautrec was often a photographic subject himself: he dressed in costume and staged various scenes, playing all sorts of roles and involving his friends in the games (famous examples are Lautrec dressed as a samurai, an altar boy, a clown, a musketeer, and a woman in heavy makeup). In an even more irreverent tone, he posed nude for the camera, orwas photographed defecating on a desolate beach. One might even consider this as an early example of what would become common practice in the 20th century: in using his own body as an artistic subject, he was creating a sort of performance art ante litteram and, at the same time, finding a way to distance himself from a body that was so often an object of ridicule.