The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera - Hardcover

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Adam Begley is the author of Updike. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 2010 and a fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography in 2011; from 1997 to 2009 he was the books editor of The New York Observer. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The London Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement. He lives with his wife in Cambridgeshire, England.

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A dazzling, stylish biography of a fabled Parisian photographer, adventurer, and pioneer. A recent biography begins, Who doesn’t know Nadar? In France, that’s a rhetorical question. Of all of the legendary figures who emerged from mid-19th-century Paris―a cohort that includes Victor Hugo and Baudelaire, Gustave Courbet, and Alexandre Dumas―Nadar may be the most innovative, the most restless, the most modern. The first great portrait photographer, a pioneering balloonist, the first person to take an aerial photograph and launch an air mail service, Nadar was one of the first celebrity artist-entrepreneurs. A kind of 19th-century Andy Warhol, he knew everyone worth knowing and photographed them all, leaving for posterity psychologically compelling portraits of Manet, Sarah Bernhardt, Delacroix, Daumier, and countless others―a priceless panorama of Parisian celebrity. Born Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, he adopted the pseudonym Nadar as a young bohemian, when he was a budding writer and cartoonist. Later he would install the name Nadar on the façade of his opulent photographic studio in giant script, the illuminated letters ten feet tall, the whole sign fifty feet long. Nadar became known to all of Europe and even across the Atlantic after he launched “The Giant,” a hot-air balloon as tall as a 12-story building, the largest of its time. His ballooning exploits, which include a catastrophic crash that made headlines around the world, inspired his friend Jules Verne create one of his most dynamic heroes. The Great Nadar illuminates a larger-than-life figure, a visionary whose outsized talent and canny self-promotion put him ahead of his time.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***

Copyright © 2017 Adam Begley

Chapter 1 NADAR ALOFT

The Year is 1860, or possible 1864. The place is a four-story building on the south side of the boulevard des Capucines, between La Madeleine and the Opera, strolling distance from the epicenter of fashionable Paris. If you look up,

you'll see near the top of the facade of number 35 a name in giant script: Nadar, signed with a flourish in red glass tubing, the letters ten feet high, the whole trademark fifty feet long. At night the sign is gaslit, a garish crimson beacon advertising the studio of the most famous photographer in France. Nadar is a celebrity, renowned not only for his portraits of eminent contemporaries but also for his caricatures, his writings, his radical politics, and his daredevil exploits as a balloonist. Today he will be calling upon several of his talents at once: he is at work on a portrait of himself as an aero­naut, a task that combines self-exposure with self-promotion and self-caricature. His motives, like almost all motives, are mixed. The photograph will advertise his art, promote the cause of human flight- the cause closest to his heart (at the moment)- and serve a specific commercial purpose: generate publicity for a memoir of his most notorious ballooning adventure. But he's chronically inca­pable of suppressing the artistic ambition that has shaped his pho­tographic career- that is, the urge to capture in every portrait an intimate and compelling psychological likeness. This photo will be a triumph.

The preparation is elaborate. A balloon gondola, a wicker bas­ket about the size of a steamer trunk, is draped in paisley fabric and suspended from the steel rafters of the studio’s glass ceiling. Equipped for flight, complete with grapnel anchor hooked to the side, the gondola must appear to hang from a vast aerostat hovering above, just beyond the frame of the photo. A canvas backdrop of painted clouds gives the illusion that the basket is floating high in the sky—such is the low-tech fakery of early photography. One of Nadar’s assistants attends to the camera, a bulky box mounted on four spidery wooden legs. Covered with a heavy black cloth, the young man peers through the lens at his boss and releases the shutter. Exposure time is a few seconds, so the celebrated aeronaut must hold his pose.

And there he is, aloft, a dapper Nadar in top hat, black coat, and floppy cravat, a jaunty tartan blanket tossed over his shoulder—a dandy of the air. Billowing out from under the brim of the hat, his hair is long, thick, and curly. His mustache, bushy, unkempt, is a reminder of his bohemian youth. Because the photo is black and white, turned sepia with age, we miss the effect of his coloring: hair and mustache are fiery red. Seated in the gondola, elbows out, shoulders square, he’s a solid, capable presence. He radiates composure and serious intent, as though he were charged with making important observations from a great height—in one hand he clutches an impressive pair of binoculars. His purposeful demeanor conveys calm in the face of danger: he is a man on a mission, going it alone.

An uncropped print of the photo comically undercuts that message: at the edge of the image, a few feet from the gondola, another assistant stands idly by, clearly unmoved by his boss’s simulated aerial adventure. The bored look on this employee’s face brings Nadar down to earth with a bump. Our hero is not drifting along with the clouds; the bottom of the basket is barely a yard above the studio floor. His long legs are tucked up inside the gondola; layers of bulky clothing and an assertive pose disguise his gangly frame—he’s about as solid as a broomstick. As for the observations he might be making from on high, he’s in truth very nearsighted, his prominent, widely spaced eyes too weak for reconnaissance. (Look closely, and you can see his spectacles hanging on a ribbon around his neck.) Though he is in fact a brave man, in most other respects the impression he’s pushing to make is false. There’s never been anything calm about Nadar: his close friend Baudelaire singled him out as “the most astonishing expression of vitality.” Exuberant, agitated, impetuous, horrified by boredom and relentlessly and infectiously gregarious, Nadar in his mid-forties is cheerfully scattered, still childlike in his roaring enthusiasms. He means well—but many in his army of companions know that they can’t always rely on him.

Nadar would be the first to laugh at the yawning gap between the pose—the image he plans to project—and the reality captured in the uncropped version of the photo. And yet ballooning is to him quite literally a matter of life and death. He’s determined to put before the public a confidence-inspiring portrait of himself as an intrepid aeronaut: he must appear resolute and in control, a pioneer exploring a new frontier, advancing a sacred cause—what he called le droit au vol (the right to flight).

His pose in another photograph taken the same day is even more intense. Rigidly upright, he stares with wide bright eyes, his fixed gaze almost messianic. Is it the future he sees in the distance, a glorious tomorrow when all mankind will be triumphantly air- borne? (The hallmarks of modernity, he believed, were “photography, electricity, and aeronautics.”) A fellow aeronaut, his wife Ernestine, is in the basket with him, the tartan blanket now wrapped around her slender frame. She looks up at her husband’s face with uneasy devotion, loyal but wary.

Wary with good cause. Ernestine was the only woman among the nine passengers aboard Nadar’s humongous balloon, Le Géant (The Giant), when it crashed spectacularly on Monday, October 19,

1863 —a disaster dramatic enough to earn Nadar newspaper head- lines on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s a tribute to his powers of per- suasion that he was able to convince his young wife to climb back into a balloon basket, even with the basket hanging in the safety of the studio.

Ernestine’s ordeal aboard Le Géant began with an auspicious launch. This was the balloon’s second outing, and a huge crowd, tens of thousands, assembled on the Champ de Mars on Sunday afternoon to watch while it was inflated with more than two hundred thousand cubic feet of gas. Next to it was a balloon of conventional size, a masterstroke on Nadar’s part. When Le Géant rose to its full height of nearly two hundred feet—about twelve stories—it was visible from all over the city; it towered above the smaller balloon. Le Géant’s gondola was a little house made of wicker, a cabin with a half-dozen separate compartments, including kitchen and lavatory. There was a separate compartment for the storage of wine and champagne. On hand to witness the liftoff were Emperor Napoleon III and his guest the king of Greece. If Nadar was gratified by the presence of these potentates, he care- fully disguised his feelings; he was not willing to compromise his radical socialist and republican loyalties, not even for the sake of promoting aeronautics.

As the sun sank in the west, Le Géant rose up magnificent and passed swiftly over the Seine, past the boulevard des Capucines, gaining altitude over Montmartre, newly annexed to the city, and sailing out over the countryside, propelled by the wind in a north- easterly direction, toward Brussels.

Crew and passengers, some of them seasoned aeronauts, some novices, ate dinner on the upper deck, enplein air. During the night, they passed over Belgium and the Netherlands and at dawn found themselves...