﻿Ever since photography was invented, the debate about wether it’s art or not, has been raging.
Some, like the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire, in 1859, would say that it
“contributed much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius”. He saw in it the
ultimate expression of the narcissist bourgeoisie wanting to possess vain images of themselves.
But he didn’t reject every single photograph. In a letter to his mother, he said that it was only
in Paris that you could find the kind of portrait he wants, exact, but with a drawing’s blurriness.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves and let’s go back to the very first
photograph made sometime between 1826 and 1827, by Nicéphore Niépce, a French inventor:
View from the Window at Le Gras. A decade later, Louis Daguerre created the daguerrotype,
a new, better and simpler way of taking pictures. It’s with this daguerrotype,
in 1838, that the first picture including a person was ever taken: Boulevard du Temple.
The exposure time, or the amount of time light is captured, was of about 8 hours
for the View from the Window at Le Gras and it was reduced to 7 minutes for the Daguerrotype.
Longer exposure times don’t allow to capture moving subjects, but the relatively short
exposure time of the daguerrotype made it so this immobile man getting his shoe shined was captured.
There’s a reason why I’m talking about the history of photography. I want to introduce
you to one of the first artists to use photography as a medium. He took his first picture in 1853,
at 33 years old, less than 20 years after Daguerre’s Boulevard du Temple, and would go on to
making history, and capturing it. He’s one of the photographers who photographed Charles Baudelaire.
Charles Baudelaire would even say of him: “Nadar, it’s the most amazing expression of vitality.”
We’re looking at Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, better known as Nadar.
“Photography is a marvelous discovery, a science that has attracted the greatest intellects,
and art that excites the most astute minds—and one that can be practiced by any imbecile.”
Nadar was an important proponent of the idea that photography can be art,
while still being aware that anyone can do photography,
yet not everyone can do it artistically. He explains it best in this quote:
“The theory of photography can be taught in an hour, preliminary technical notions in a day...
What cannot be taught is the moral intelligence of the subject, or the instinctive tact that puts you
in touch with the model, allowing you to size them up and to steer them toward their habits,
their ideas, according to each person's character. This enables you to offer something more than the
ordinary, accidental plastic reproduction that the humblest laboratory assistant could manage. It
enables you to achieve the most familiar, the most positive resemblance: a speaking likeness. This
is the psychological side of photography. I don’t think that is too ambitious a term.”
Through his artistic process, he photographed some of the greatest minds of 19h century France:
Victor Hugo, the author of Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame,
Alexandre Dumas, the author of the Three Musketeers and the Count of Monte Cristo,
Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, better known as George Sand,
the female author who used a male name to subvert the misogyny of the literary world,
Jules Verne, who wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth
and Around the World in 80 days, and Émile Zola, the influential critic and author of Germinal.
He didn’t only photograph authors, there was also famous visual artists such as Eugène Delacroix,
the painter behind Liberty Leading the People, Jean-François Millet, who painted The Gleaners,
Gustave Courbet, the creator of A Burial at Ornans, The Painter’s Studio and The Desperate
Man, Édouard Manet, who painted Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Olympia, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère,
Claude Monet, known for Impression Sunrise which was first exhibited at the highly
important exhibition of the Impressionists hosted in Nadar’s studio, Auguste Rodin,
the creator of The Thinker and Gustave Eiffel, the man famous for designing a famous tower.
Finally, he also photographed many political actors and thinkers, notably anarchists: Peter
Kropotkin, known for the Bread Book and Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Mikhail Bakunin,
the famous Russian revolutionary and fierce opponent of Marx, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,
author of What is Property? In which he famously declared that property is
theft. Élisé Reclus, a world-famous geographer who was banished in France for his activism.
He also photographed Louise Michel, the anarchist woman known for her leadership during the Paris
Commune and Caroline Rémy de Guebhard, the incisive anarchist journalist known as Sévérine.
Nadar had a pretty extravagant life and, just like many of the anarchists he photographed,
he also got his hands dirty. In 1848, he went to Poland under the name “Nadarsky” to
join the Greater Poland Uprising, but was caught, arrested and imprisoned.
He also contributed to the resistance during the Siege of Paris from September 1870
to January 1871. Paris was isolated from the world. Every single mode of communication with
the outside world was blocked, so Nadar organized a new kind of postal service.
See, Nadar was famous in Paris not only for his photographs,
but also for his fascination for hot air balloons.
Here’s a quote from the book “The
Judgement of Paris” explaining Nadar’s actions during the siege:
“On the second day of the siege, Nadar had ascended above the Prussian line of investment
in a hot-air balloon, not to deliver post but to shower the enemy soldiers with leaflets
castigating them for attacking Paris, the pinnacle of civilization. Unable
to steer his balloon back to Paris, he touched down in the countryside beyond,
from where it was impossible to get back into the city. For Nadar at least, the siege was over.”
On October 4th 1863, 7 years before the siege, Nadar made history by embarking on Le Géant. It
inspired Jules Verne’s first novel Five Weeks in a Balloon, published in 1863.
However, Nadar’s balloon trip didn’t last five weeks. The departure of the giant, an enormous
60m tall balloon, was attended by close to one third of Paris’ population. A military band
played for 2h to celebrate the event as Captain Nadar and 12 other passengers flew up to the sky.
40 kilometers later, the balloon had a malfunction and had to make an emergency landing.
But Nadar, being the intrepid man that he is,
didn’t give up. Weeks later, the giant had a second flight,
this one lasting 17 hours and resulting in a crash-landing, breaking both of Nadar’s legs.
From his balloons, Nadar created the first ever aerial photographs.
He also innovated by taking pictures, not only above ground, but underground
through his series on the Paris sewers and the Paris catacombs.
“Who doesn't know Nadar? In France, that's a rhetorical question.” This sentence not only
applies to the 19th century, where Nadar seemed to know everyone in Paris, but also to contemporary
France where Nadar has been immortalized as one of the greatest artists of the century.
I’m going to ask you a terrible question, but it needs to be, if not answered, at least considered.
Did Nadar gain notoriety because of his ability, as he said,
to master the psychological side of photography, or was he just able to profit
from the image-oriented cult of celebrity he, himself, helped cultivate through his pictures?
Perhaps, it’s a bit of both, but it’s hard to imagine a Nadar still being relevant in the 21th
century if he hadn’t taken portraits of the greatest figures of 19th century France.
Forgotten or remembered, Nadar is nonetheless, through his dedication to his craft,
through the meticulous thought put in his work and through his incessantly innovative spirit,
a brilliant creative mind and a magnificent artist.