Bruce Sterling - Essays. Catscan Columns

Groups, clubs, salons and movements were the basic infrastructure of Bohemia. The bonds of counterculture were highly informal, highly personal, highly tribal. It was a tightly-knit society in which personality loomed large. It was almost possible to make an entire career merely through prolonged and determined hanging-out.

Nadar manifested a positive genius for this sort of activity. In his early years in the 1840s, Nadar oscillated between the literary circles of Murger and Baudelaire. But by 1865, Nadar boasted, probably quite accurately, that he knew 10,000 Parisians personally. Nadar possessed enormous personal charisma; except for his own kin, he apparently never made an enemy, and everyone who ever met him remembered him very well.

Nadar began his Parisian career as a newspaper caricaturist. His caricatures, collected in a whopping tome called NADAR DESSINS ET ECRITS (Paris 1979) show a certain inky liveliness and keen eye for the ludicrous, but he was no Daumier. His career in journalism was highly unstable. Most of the magazines Nadar wrote and cartooned for either collapsed in short order from public disinterest or were shut down by the government for radical sedition. This signally failed to discourage Nadar, however. Around 1850 he hatched a grand scheme to personally document every celebrity in Paris, in a monster project to be called "Pantheon Nadar."

Even with help, it was far beyond his ability to complete this "Pantheon," and the project eventually foundered -- but not before Nadar had met and sketched some 300 prominent literateurs, journalists, critics and tastemakers. He left knowing every last one of them by their first names.

While trying to upgrade the art of caricature to an industrial scale, Nadar, in 1853, stumbled into the dawning world of photography. He originally saw photography as a means of swiftly documenting celebrities for later caricature by hand, but he swiftly realized that he could dump the tiresome ink-work entirely and go straight for real-life portraiture in a glamorous new medium.

Nadar wrote fifteen books, including novels and memoirs, and was a prominent aviation pioneer, but photography proved to be the closest thing he had to a true metier. Though he did patent an artificial lighting system in 1861, Nadar was not a major technical pioneer in photography -- not a Daguerre or a Fox-Talbot. He had contemporary commercial rivals, as well: Antony Adam- Solomon, Pierre Petit, Etienne Cajart, and others.

Nadar's genuine pioneer status lay in his appropriation of this new technology into unexpected contexts. He was the first to take a picture from the air, the first to take a picture underground, the first to take a picture by artificial light.

And he was the first to appropriate this technical innovation and bend it to the purposes of the Bohemian art-world. This was an archetypal case of the Rue Jules Verne finding its own uses for things. Nadar stated his philosophy of photography in 1856, when he rudely sued his own younger brother for sole ownership of the (now thriving) Nadar photographic atelier trade-name.

"The theory of photography can be learnt in an hour and the elements of practicing in a day.... What cannot be learnt is the sense of light, an artistic feeling.... What can be learnt even less is the moral grasp of the subject -- that instant understanding which puts you in touch with the model, helps you to sum him up, guides you to his habits, his ideas and his character and enables you to produce, not an indifferent reproduction, a matter of routine or accident such as any laboratory assistant could achieve, but a really convincing and sympathetic likeness, an intimate portrait."

It's pleasant to see how this rhetoric works. Theory means little, practice less. Successfully shifting the terms of debate from the technical to the artistic robs actual photographic experts of all their cultural authority. In an instant, the technology's originators dwindle into the miserable nerdish status of the "laboratory assistant."

The crux of photography now becomes a matter of innate talent, a question of personal gifts. Inspiration knows no baud rate. As Nadar remarked later: "In photography as in everything else there are people who know how to see and others who don't even know how to look." This is a splendid kind of audacity, the sign of a subculture which is not beleaguered and defensive but confident, alert and aggressively omnivorous.

It's a mark of Nadar's peculiar genius that he was able to devour photography and thrive while digesting it, rather than recoiling in future shock like his contemporary and close friend Baudelaire. In 1859 Baudelaire wrote a long screed against photography, in which he decried its threat to aesthetics and the avante- garde.

"...(I)t is nonetheless obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy.... If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude that is its natural ally."

Baudelaire nevertheless posed for Nadar's camera. In fact Baudelaire admired Nadar very much, aptly describing Nadar as an "astounding example of vitality." Baudelaire's photo is on page 67 and Nadar's portrait of the author of FLOWERS OF EVIL is without any doubt the single most remarkable image in the Nadar collection.

Despite the fact that he has stuffed one mitt into an oversized double-breasted coat in Napoleonic fashion, Baudelaire looks shockingly contemporary. It's a face that you could see tomorrow in SPY or SPIN or INTERVIEW, sharp, slightly contemptuous, utterly self-possessed. The photograph is 1855, two years before the police seizure and legal condemnation of FLOWERS OF EVIL.

The Goncourt Brothers said that Baudelaire had "the face of a maniac, a voice that cuts like steel." There is no recorded trace of his voice, but the face Nadar preserved for us is indeed maniacal -- which is to say, the face of someone not from the Goncourts' century, but rather from our own. Baudelaire looked like a maniac because he looks just like one of us.

FLOWERS OF EVIL is probably the greatest literary monument of the Paris Bohemia, a book which after 136 years remains in many ways novel, frightening and unsettling. Today it's not the frank eroticism and deliberate blasphemy which disturb -- although "Les Bijoux," a chop-licking description of Baudelaire's mistress lolling around on a divan naked under her stage jewelry, remains remarkably hot and bothersome.

It's not the period elements that sting, but that vibrant underlying mania. Just test the potency of the following lines, an invocation to Death in "Le Voyage," the last poem in Fleurs du Mal:

"O Death, old captain, it is time! Lift anchor!

This land wearies us, o Death, let us set sail!

Even though sky and sea are black as ink,

Our hearts you know are filled with light!

Pour out your poison to strengthen us!

Our brains are so scorched with flame that we want

To plunge to the depths of the abyss, what matter if it be Hell or Heaven?

-- To the bottom of the Unknown to find something *new!*

For all his pop-star world-weary aesthetic posing -- Nadar describes Baudelaire as favoring excessively flared black jackets, red scarves, pink gloves and shoulder- length curling hair -- Baudelaire clearly *meant* this. He'll immolate himself, run any mad risk to break through consensus reality, to smash the ennui of civilization and all mortal limits in the slim hope of achieving some completely unknown form of ontological novelty. This is a junkie's rhetoric, but in an odd and menacing way quite timeless. It's a declaration one might take to heart today just before eating a double-handful of untested smart-drugs, and it could serve just as well as the rhetoric of some 22nd-century posthuman deliberately tweaking his own genetics. In some profound sense, it does not bode well for humanity that we are capable of producing a work like Fleurs du Mal.