Q. Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, better known as Nadar, is practically a legend in France. Yet apart from photography circles, he’s little known in the United States. When did you first encounter Nadar, and what compelled you to write his biography?
A. There was a major show of Nadar’s photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York way back in 1995, and I remember being impressed with his portraits at the time—but then I kind of forgot about him for nearly twenty years, until the summer of 2013, when I read Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life, a wonderful book, part essay, part short story, part memoir, in which Nadar makes a cameo appearance. Thanks to Barnes, Félix charmed me, as he had charmed so many others. And so I went back to the photographs—and was even more impressed this time—and at last tried to find out something about Nadar’s extraordinary life.
Q. Can you describe the extent of the research you conducted in writing The Great Nadar? What was your most surprising discovery?
A. There are several biographies of Nadar in French, and I read all of those and still needed to know more, so I spent a good deal of time in the national library in Paris, reading Nadar’s extensive correspondence. I read until French nineteenth-century handwriting was as familiar to me as newsprint. And I also read his published writings, including his novel and his short stories and journalism, much of which is very entertaining. I guess what surprised me most was his unflagging energy. He was a dynamo—and stayed that way well into his eighties. The proof of it was there in the library. And his energy wasn’t confined to art. He had a curious compulsion to make a panoramic portrait of his artistic milieu in Paris, as though making a record of the faces of his illustrious contemporaries—from Baudelaire and Manet to Sarah Bernhardt and Victor Hugo—was a matter of life and death. He always kept one eye on posterity; lasting fame, his own and others’, meant everything to him.
Q. You believe that Nadar did more than almost anyone to establish photographic portraiture as an art in its own right. Can you elaborate?
A. I’m not making a novel claim here—historians of photography have praised Nadar as one of the greats for more than half a century. What he did at the dawn of photography—he was born before it was invented—was use it to make a compelling and intimate psychological resemblance. He banished props and backdrops and made you look at a face and really see what kind of person you are looking at. He believed that he was revealing the truth about his subjects, many of whom were celebrities. And Paris, fascinated, rewarded him by making him the most famous photographer in France—which at that time meant he was the most famous photographer in the world. Everyone wanted to sit for Nadar, the way everyone today wants to sit for Annie Leibovitz.
Q. Nadar’s photographs feel so immediate and personal, which for me raises a rather personal question. Which is your favorite of his portraits, and why?
A. Can I choose two? They’re both of Ernestine, Félix’s wife, whom he married in 1854, when he was thirty-four and she only eighteen—nearly half his age. The first portrait probably dates from shortly after they married. (It looks like she’s wearing a wedding ring.) Is the wary, combative expression on her face proof that she already knows Félix too well, and is determined not to be taken in by his charm? The flared nostril and slight squint (her eyes look straight at the camera) could be signs of irritation—or of a teasing skirmish. She could be flirting with him, pretending to be on her guard when in fact she has already willingly surrendered. My guess is that the pose is ironic, compounded of love and comically exaggerated annoyance. The marriage lasted fifty-five years, which speaks for itself. And then there’s a much later portrait: white haired, dark eyed, delicate, and tender, Ernestine holds a sprig of violets to her lips. A stroke she suffered three years earlier has left her partially paralyzed, yet her pose is graceful, serene. In this intimate moment she is a beautiful woman. Roland Barthes called the portrait “one of the loveliest photographs in the world.” It’s easy to see what appealed to him.
Q: You depict a Parisian cultural world that is wonderfully heterogeneous and close-knit, with painters, poets, novelists, opera singers, and journalists all regularly mingling at salons and
theaters. In what ways do you think this milieu is different from modern celebrity culture?
A. Today’s celebrities are by comparison highly specialized creatures. Often their only talent is for being famous. In Nadar’s day you might be famous as an actress and then quit the stage and become a journalist and a notorious wit, the star of your own salon. A celebrated character like Félix’s great friend Théophile Gautier (who coined the phrase “art for art’s sake”) was a poet, dramatist, novelist, travel writer, art critic, and literary critic. He wrote the scenario for the ballet Giselle. And he could paint. Nadar was also multitalented, and had three careers (writer, caricaturist, photographer), any one of which would have satisfied a less restless and ambitious soul.
Q. Can you discuss Nadar’s other adventures, some of which had nothing to do with the arts?
A. Nadar was obsessed with the idea of human flight, and more particularly aerial navigation, which he realized right away could not be achieved with lighter-than-air balloons. In the early 1860s he founded the Society for the Promotion of Heavier-than-Air Locomotion—in other words, he envisaged modern-day aircraft decades before the Wright brothers. He predicted the ease of movement that aviation would bring: “From all corners of the world, man takes off, prompt like electricity, and soars and descends like a bird at the desired spot.” To raise money for research into heavier-than-air locomotion, he built the biggest gas balloon of its time, The Giant. On her second voyage, The Giant crashed spectacularly (with Félix and Ernestine aboard)—a disaster dramatic enough to earn Nadar newspaper headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. He was already famous as a photographer, and now he was famous as an aeronaut.
Q. Did his knack for self-promotion allow him to parlay one success into another, or did his many shoes, as it were, ever trip him up?
A. When Nadar died The New York Times published his obituary under the headline, FAMED BOULEVARDIER DEAD. His scattered, scattershot fame had eclipsed his artistic achievement. It wasn’t until later, when the sheen of his celebrity wore off, that his photographs came to be recognized as great works of art.
Q: Nadar’s livre d’or contains a multitude of fascinating personalities, most of whom I hadn’t
heard of before. Do you have a favorite among the figures from Nadar’s circle who you
discovered while researching the book?
A. Perhaps the oddest page from that autograph album consists of fantastical doodles of grotesque goblins and monsters by a friend of Félix and Baudelaire, Armand du Mesnil, a bureaucrat who worked doggedly in the ministry of education for forty years, all the while yearning for the literary life. The curious du Mesnil doodles include a rabbit-like creature with alarming teeth and claws; running human legs that meet at a crotch that is a face; and a knock-kneed humanoid with the head of a cross-eyed bird. The gothic flavor of the drawings is a reminder that tales of supernatural horror were enormously popular at the time. Baudelaire, the apostle of modernity, was as famous for having translated Edgar Allan Poe as he was for the scandal of Les Fleurs du mal. The daydreams of du Mesnil, the kind-hearted government bureaucrat whose career obliged him to be the servant of the orderly and the rational, were populated with nightmare monsters, surreal creatures crawling out of the unconscious.
Q. What can we learn from Nadar, in the age of Instagram and the selfie?
A. Nadar’s portraits took time, and depended on his charm: he had to make his subject relax to reveal his or her true face. In other words, he could only make a portrait after having established a connection with the sitter. Human interaction—wit, charm, empathy—was at the core of Nadar’s art.
