Nadar

Nadar’s Career and Nineteenth-Century Paris

Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, known as Nadar, was born in Paris on April 6, 1820. The BnF authority record also documents his death in Paris on March 20, 1910.^*18 Before becoming a photographer, he worked as a journalist, writer, and caricaturist in the Parisian press and literary worlds. His large 1854 lithograph Panthéon Nadar assembled such contemporary cultural figures as George Sand, Victor Hugo, Balzac, and Alexandre Dumas. Even before he photographed people, he was already mapping those who shaped the culture of his time as a network of faces.^*15

Around 1854, he established a commercial photography studio at 113 Rue Saint-Lazare and produced portraits primarily of his friends among writers, artists, and actors. The BnF emphasizes how Nadar’s bohemian circle converged with portraiture as a commodity, distinguishing his operation from the large commercial studios of the period.^*19 In 1860, he moved to a large studio at 35 Boulevard des Capucines, developing an enterprise that The Met describes as one of the foremost portrait studios in Paris.^*14

“Nadar,” however, was never a name fixed exclusively to Félix’s signature. A BnF retrospective examines three Nadars—including his brother Adrien and his son Paul—and shows how the studio name developed into both a family-based production system and a commercial brand.^*2 Distinguishing later works credited to “Atelier Nadar” from photographs made by Félix himself is therefore important when assessing dates and authorship.

Nadar also took photographic technology beyond the studio. He began experimenting with aerial photography in 1858, patented a photographic process using electric light in 1861, photographed the catacombs in 1862, and photographed the sewers in 1865. He did not use the giant balloon Le Géant for the experiments of 1858; Le Géant belonged to a separate aeronautical venture of the 1860s. By photographing from the opposite extremes of the air and the underground, he sought to free the photographic viewpoint from ground level and natural light at a time when transportation, sanitation, and urban reconstruction were transforming Paris under the Second Empire.^*21

In April 1874, Nadar’s former studio at 35 Boulevard des Capucines hosted the first Impressionist exhibition, featuring Monet, Degas, Pissarro, Renoir, and others. The fact that a portrait studio, aeronautical experiments, records of the urban underground, and a venue for avant-garde art all intersect in one life makes Nadar more than a celebrated portrait photographer.^*4

Portrait Photography—Light and Psychological Likeness

In his portraits, Nadar kept the background spare and directed attention toward the face, posture, hands, clothing, and the angle of the light, instead of explaining social status through layers of opulent furniture and painted scenery. In Nadar’s own words, preserved by the BnF, photographic technique can be learned, but a feeling for light and the ability to understand the sitter’s “psychological side” cannot easily be taught.^*19 Portraiture thus shifted from a setting filled with signs of rank to a question of how the photographer sees and forms a relationship with the subject.

The Portrait Industry under the Second Empire

Portrait photography was itself becoming rapidly accessible to a mass public in the 1850s and 1860s, as Nadar developed his studio. In 1854, André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri patented the châssis multiplicateur, which made it possible to take several small portraits on a single glass plate and thereby lowered production costs and retail prices. The BnF explains that this invention brought the carte-de-visite portrait within reach of a broader clientele.^*23 Nadar’s portraits emerged within a market in which photographs of faces were beginning to circulate widely as commodities, after the era when studios served only a small number of privileged clients.

35 Boulevard des Capucines—Commercial Studio and Cultural Circle

The large studio that opened in 1860 was a commercial portrait business visited by ordinary bourgeois clients as well as a private setting where Nadar photographed his artist friends. The Met describes it as one of the leading portrait enterprises in Paris and notes that Nadar’s own photography coexisted with a high volume of commercial work made by his staff.^*14 The aesthetic of the “natural portrait” took shape within the studio system that produced photographs as repeatable commodities. This conjunction was central to the modernity of nineteenth-century portrait photography.

Disdéri and Nadar—Mass Portraiture and Psychological Portraiture

Disdéri’s carte-de-visite process efficiently placed multiple poses on a single plate and reduced the price of a portrait. Nadar, while embracing the commercial studio system, foregrounded the adjustment of light, posture, expression, and conversation for each sitter as the source of a portrait’s value. The distinction cannot be reduced to “mass production versus art.” Musée Carnavalet holds a carte-de-visite portrait by Atelier Nadar, confirming that Nadar’s own studio participated in the commercial circulation of small-format portraits.^*24 The difference lay in changing how a person was presented within the same commercial market, not in rejecting the format.

Aerial Photography—The Experiments of 1858 and Paris in 1868

In 1858, Nadar experimented with making wet-plate photographs from a balloon. The BnF reports that he achieved his first success over Petit-Bicêtre in the autumn of that year, although no print survives.^*12 The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum identifies a photograph taken over Boston by James Wallace Black in 1860 as the oldest surviving aerial photograph.^*13 The 2026 exhibition at the Catacombs of Paris further presents Nadar’s 1868 aerial view of Paris as one of the earliest surviving urban aerial photographs, showing how a viewpoint from the sky changed representations of the modern city.^*21

The wet-plate collodion process required the photographer to expose and develop a sensitized glass plate before it dried. Aerial photography therefore required bringing not just the camera but also darkroom work into the balloon. The innovation consisted of moving the entire photographic process, previously bound to a ground-based working environment, into the air and detaching the photographer’s viewpoint from the earth, as well as photographing from a great height.^*13

Artificial Light—Photographing the Catacombs in 1862

Nadar began experimenting with photography by artificial light around 1859 and obtained a patent in 1861. The BnF describes his photographs of the catacombs in 1862 and the sewers in 1865 as later developments of this work.^*17 The Met’s Catacombs, Paris, made in April 1862, is held as an example produced with an early arc lamp designed by Nadar himself.^*16 Underground photography became more than a novel technical experiment: it also documented urban infrastructure hidden from street level during Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris. The exhibition at the Catacombs of Paris treats aerial and underground photography as two vertical perspectives on a city being remade.^*21

A technical history focused only on the ability to illuminate darkness cannot fully account for the photographs of the catacombs and sewers. Shao-Chien Tseng interprets Nadar’s images of subterranean Paris made by electric light as a map of the “urban body,” showing how the Haussmann-era city isolated, sanitized, and managed corpses, sewage, and waste.^*25 Beneath the modern order taking shape above ground lay the infrastructure of death and excretion that sustained it. Nadar’s artificial light made hidden sites photographable and brought before the public an urban interior that modernization had rendered invisible.

Nadar’s Place in Photographic History

Nadar’s portraits hold an important place in photographic history for more than the visual spareness of their backgrounds. He combined the observational experience of a journalist and caricaturist, direct ties to a bohemian cultural circle, and the mass-production setting of a commercial studio. In doing so, he moved portraiture away from images that defined a sitter through social signs and toward photographs that sought to read individual character and intellect. The BnF distinguishes Nadar’s work from that of the large studios of his day by describing his portraits as lively, sympathetic to their subjects, and artistic.^*19

From Panthéon Nadar through his studio portraits, Nadar did more than photograph nineteenth-century Parisian cultural figures one by one: he visualized a human network spanning literature, art, theater, and journalism. At the same time, 35 Boulevard des Capucines was a commercial establishment serving the general public, where artistic portraiture and the photographic industry operated in the same place. The BnF chronology documents the development of the business, including the move to a large studio and its high operating costs.^*20

Aerial and underground photography were not sidelines unrelated to Nadar’s portraits. Just as he removed extraneous staging from the sitter in his portraiture, his technical experiments removed the assumptions that photography depended on the ground, natural light, and the studio. The paired directions—from above to survey the city and from below to examine its internal structure—helped turn photography into a means of visualizing the modern city. The current exhibition at the Catacombs of Paris likewise reassesses this work in relation to the urban transformation of the Haussmann era.^*21

The use of his former studio for the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 also shows that photography and painting cannot be understood solely in terms of simple competition. Moving among the roles of photographer, entrepreneur, aeronautical experimenter, and friend to cultural figures, Nadar embodied the ways photography was produced, commercialized, and shared within nineteenth-century urban culture.^*4

Stephen Bann examines Nadar as more than a hero who achieved a succession of technical “firsts.” He presents him as a figure who continued to reflect through both photography and writing on the historical experience of a nineteenth century shaped by the intersections of revolution, war, and social and economic progress.^*26 Viewed as a continuous body of work, the aerial photographs, underground images, portraits, and memoirs share more than a curiosity about new technology. Across these different endeavors runs the question of how photography records a rapidly changing society and how people come to understand that change as history.

From Portrait as Commodity to the Representation of the Individual

Within the portrait market of the Second Empire, Nadar’s spare backgrounds did not signify an escape from commercial photography. At a time when the carte de visite had turned the face into a commodity that could be exchanged and collected in large numbers, Nadar placed greater value on subtle differences in faces and bodies than on backdrops and props, while working within the same studio economy.^*23 His shift did not rescue portraiture from mass circulation. It demonstrated that even after mass circulation had been established, the relationship between photographer and sitter could itself become the content of a photograph.

Nadar’s Portraits and Celebrity Culture

Nadar’s portraits were also bound up with the expanding nineteenth-century culture of possessing and viewing the faces of celebrities. His portrait of Théophile Gautier in MoMA’s collection dates to 1855, while the portrait of Honoré Daumier in the National Gallery of Art was made in 1856–58. Private relationships with writers and artists were thus transferred into a commercial network of portraiture.^*6 The NGA describes the Daumier portrait as an expression of esteem for a fellow artist and notes that Nadar may have charged less than his usual fee.^*8 These works clearly demonstrate Nadar’s method of constructing a persona through a spare background, clothing, posture, and gaze, without using props to explain the sitter’s celebrity.

Nadar’s studio, however, was a business that mass-produced portraits as commodities, as well as a salon for friends. The 1857 Portrait de femme in the Musée d’Orsay bears the stamp “NADAR & Cie, SOCIETE DE PHOTOGRAPHIE ARTISTIQUE, 113 R. St LAZARE,” showing that the ideal of artistic portraiture operated within a corporate organization and the mechanisms of commercial photography.^*9 The many portraits held by MoMA also make it possible to trace, work by work, the breadth of his portrait photography from the 1850s onward.^*7

Nadar himself was not an observer standing outside this culture of celebrity. Jillian Lerner analyzes how, during his transition from caricature to photography, he repeatedly used signatures, self-portraits, images combining photographs and illustrations, and advertising to establish “Nadar” as a recognizable brand across multiple media.^*27 Artistic portraiture and commercial publicity were compatible here. Photographing cultural figures, performing as a cultural figure himself, and making the studio a recognized urban landmark together created a single photography business.

His conception of portraiture was not limited to the face. Emily Eastgate Brink discusses La main du banquier D. as a modern “portrait in pieces” that attempts to read character and identity from a banker’s hand alone.^*28 Nadar’s portraiture matters for more than his use of simplified backgrounds to photograph faces: it connected photography to the nineteenth-century problem of representing character itself, asking whether a person could also be read through fragments such as handwriting, a hand, or posture.

Documentary Photography and Scientific Vision

The photographic activity of the Nadar family extended beyond portraiture and aerial photography. The BnF details the family’s involvement in photographic applications connected with the observational sciences, including medicine, anthropometry, anthropology, agriculture, cartography, and military strategy.^*10 Unlike portraits constructed as psychological character studies, these applications called for seemingly objective forms such as frontal views, clarity, and the recording of detail. Read as extensions of documentary photography, Nadar’s aerial and underground images show that he did not repeat a single style but reconfigured the appearance of photographs according to their purpose.

Artificial light was not introduced suddenly for underground photography. The photographic records of the French Ministry of Culture include the 1861 Effet de lumière sur une main, an experiment in lighting a hand with artificial light.^*11 This experiment, which led to the catacomb photographs of the following year, mattered both as the technical achievement of photographing in darkness and as a change to the spatial and temporal constraints of photography, made possible by the photographer’s active design of light.

Collections and Scholarship on Nadar

The Met, George Eastman Museum, and Getty Museum hold substantial groups of Nadar’s portraits and technical experiments, allowing the date and process of individual works to be compared.^*1 The Eastman Museum presents materials on Nadar as a major figure in the history of photographic technology, while the Getty organizes groups of portraits by maker.^*3 The Met’s monograph Nadar spans portraiture, technical experimentation, and cultural history, showing that his current reputation extends beyond that of a portraitist of celebrities.^*22 The Getty’s object records likewise provide a basis for examining the studio’s long activity work by work.^*5