Richard Holmes - Sidetracks

Nadar was now thirty-four. He bought a house at 113 rue Saint-Lazare, married, and gave dinner parties for his Bohemian friends, many like him now distinguished. Meanwhile the decisive discovery of his ideal medium occurred almost unnoticed. A painter friend left a second-hand photographic apparatus in the corner of the atelier. Mais, quand même … With predestined ease, Nadar learnt to prepare the wet-collodion glass plates; and his friends, long accustomed to his vagaries, learned to sit unselfconsciously under the hard, searching exposures – between 30 and 120 seconds – in blazing sunlight. From the garden he moved to the attic, which was soon fitted with glass tiles. Nadar’s strange combination of artistic and commercial gifts, and his flair for the new craft of publicity, found its instant culmination. At last the image could be trapped. In the spring of 1855, with the ‘Pantheon’ still fresh from the lithographic stone, Nadar set up as a photographer.

By 1856, with dazzling speed, he had temporarily transformed himself into ‘Nadar et Cie’ to capitalize the business, and he won the grande medaille d’or for photography at the Brussels Exhibition that summer. A legal battle with his younger brother, Adrien, finally won him, in 1857, exclusive right to the ‘marque de fabrication’ of Nadar. Significantly, it was the first time in France that an artistic pseudonym had been disputed as a commercial property. Felix Tournachon’s transformation was now complete: he was ‘Nadar Photographe’.

Within the next fifteen years, the atelier Nadar produced one of the greatest sets of contemporary portraits ever made. From 500,000 or so remaining glass and emulsion negatives, perhaps some 300 prints compose the chef d’oeuvre of the collection. For the most part these are of writers. They cover the whole panorama of mid-nineteenth-century French literature: Baudelaire, Gautier, Nerval, de Banville, Lamartine, Hugo, Dumas père et fils, George Sand, Du Camp, Daudet, Verne, Scribe, Murger, Champfleury, the freères Goncourt, Sainte-Beuve, Michelet, Charles Philipon and Emile de Girardin, and literally scores and scores of others. But there are many musicians as well – Berlioz, Rossini, Offenbach; and painters – Delacroix, Corbet, Corot, Monet. There is also a set of Sarah Bernhardt, and a charming nude study of Henri Murger’s mistress, the original Musette of the Bohemian stories. It is, in effect, a second ‘Pantheon Nadar’, except of infinitely greater human penetration. The best photographic portraits should be, wrote Nadar, ‘ample like a Van Dyck, and elaborate like a Holbein’.

Nadar’s portraits, in fact, owed much to painting, especially Ingres (who in turn used Nadar’s photographs for his own studio work). The monumental simplicity of their presentation, the subtle use of their advancing and retreating shadow, and the bold play with the texture of a jacket, blouse or cape, to offset the flesh of face or hands, all are constant marks of Nadar’s work. His best period, up to 1874, coincided with the use of the wet-plate collodion process: this rarely required poses of less than twenty seconds, and emphasized the sense of an intense, prolonged, revelatory gaze deep into the subject’s psyche. After 1872–73, gelatine emulsion brought exposure times down to less than a second, and the subject could be ‘snapped’ without his cooperative effort in the process of capturing and holding the fugitive image.

Nadar defended the autonomy of his art, with force and pride.

The theory of photography can be learnt in an hour, and the first practical steps in a day … But what can be learnt far less readily is the moral nature of your subject; it is the rapid reflex which puts you in touch with your model, makes you grasp and judge his habitual style and ideas, and allows you to produce – not some superficial or lucky shot, some indifferent and tasteful reproduction within the range of the meanest laboratory assistant – but the most familiar and the most favourable likeness: la resemblance intime.

It was an assertion that expressed the effort and experience behind an entire career.

In 1860 Nadar moved to the address which he consecrated for French photography, on the boulevard des Capucines. He charged 50 francs for a half-plate portrait, and joyfully spread the old ‘bull’s blood’ insignia across his whole decor, even down to the wrapping paper. He always continued to scorn Emperor and Court, leaving royal clientele to the Mediterranean beach-photographer Disderi, in the suitable vulgarity of the boulevard des Italiens. At the grand piano under the open studio windows, Jacques Offenbach was encouraged to play variations on the revolutionary Marseillaise, while the Imperial Guard – martial but tone-deaf–trotted in glittering ranks towards the Place de l’Opéra.

In 1862 Charles Philipon died, and thereafter Nadar’s energies were increasingly expended in madcap projects. He pioneered flash and aerial photography, and founded a Society for the Promulgation of Heavier Than Air Machines. It was now Daumier’s turn to caricature him, suspended in a balloon with his camera over the Arc de Triomphe, ‘at the height of his art’. He squandered his resources almost to bankruptcy in his own immense scarlet publicity balloon, Le Géant, which the Scientific American stonily reported as capable of carrying eighty persons, a printing press, beds and lavabos, and of course a photographic laboratory. But in a night crash-landing near Hanover, Le Géant nearly killed both him and his faithful, long-suffering wife, and Victor Hugo was moved to propose a relief fund. The Secretary of the Heavier Than Air Society, the young Jules Verne, canonized Nadar as the hero of De la Terre à la Lune – the astronaut Michel Ardan, a final anagrammatic transformation of the fiery nomenclature. ‘He was a dare-devil, a Phaeton driving the Sun’s chariot at break-neck speed, an Icarus with replaceable wings.’

To the end of his life, Nadar always remained fascinated by the rapport between writers and the photographic image. In calm old age, in 1900, he recalled how Balzac refused to be photographed because he held a Lucretian theory of spectres (like the Sioux Indians), believing that each exposure dissolved some vital layer of life through the malign alchemy of the Dark Room. Nerval and Gautier had proposed a more gothic hypothesis, that each photograph somehow released a fiendish doppelgänger, who might pursue them across the ether until death. Nerval in fact was only ever photographed once, by Nadar in January 1855; it was about a fortnight before the poet committed suicide in the rue de la Vieille-Lanterne.

But it was Baudelaire who had led the most sustained attack on early photography, in his scathing, salon review of 1859. Pressing home a diatribe against the vapid popular taste for ‘realism’ in art, he thundered prophetically: ‘A revengeful God has answered the supplications of the multitude. His Messiah was Monsieur Daguerre. And the multitude said: “… Art means Photography”. From this moment forth, our vile society, like some Narcissus, rushed to contemplate its own trivial image in the metal plate. A madness, an extraordinary zealotry seized these new worshippers of sunlight. And strange abominations were brought forth.’ It must have seemed ironic in retrospect. For Nadar’s photographic series of Baudelaire between 1854 and 1862 is one of the most expressive documents available about the self-destructive force of the poet’s own life. As it is also one of the triumphs of Nadar’s art.

Before he died, Baudelaire in turn enshrined Nadar, the photographic witness of the doomed Empire, in one of his own superb images from the late prose poems.