Why the Parisian photographer of the 19th century was called "New Leonardo": Nadar and his brilliant photographs

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

This man, who lived in the 19th century, rightfully earned the epithet "new Leonardo". An artist, cartoonist, chemist, inventor, aeronaut, writer, theater playwright - his talents were incredibly diverse, but he was remembered by descendants as a brilliant photographer. It is thanks to photographs from Nadar's studio that we today know what many famous people of that time looked like, and from his photographs of Paris, scientists are studying the history of this city today. In April 2020, the world celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of a man who became a symbol of his era.

Gaspard-Felix Tournachon was born on April 6, 1820 in Paris into the family of a publisher. However, the young man did not enjoy a calm, secure life for long. When the young man was 17 years old, his father died, and the publishing house went bankrupt, so he really started from scratch. After dropping out of medical college, Gaspard decided to write for newspapers and plunged headlong into Parisian bohemian life. He emerged from it with a baggage of acquaintances with the most talented poets, artists and writers, with the well-deserved fame of a cartoonist journalist and with a fairly shortened name: the young man shortened the complex surname Turnashon in several steps to Nadar, and later under this pseudonym became known to the whole world.

In 1852, Nadar conceived his first ambitious project. He decided to create a huge gallery of caricatured portraits of famous contemporaries. The result of two years of work was the "Pantheon of Nadar" - a huge lithographic sheet, which crowded caricatures of 240 French writers. This was only a quarter of the planned work, but the artist did not continue it, as the enterprise turned out to be too costly. Nadar first photographed all models (by this time he became a co-owner of his brother's photo studio), and then he painted. I must say that this project, although unfinished, brought the artist great fame: the celebrities did not take offense at the skillfully executed caricatures, but were afraid not to get into the Pantheon in the company of other stars, so the reputation that Nadar gained for himself during these years was much more expensive than the immediate benefits of lithography.

Thanks to his work on Pantheon, Nadar was fascinated by photography. He wrote: During his life, Nadar became the author of a whole gallery of magnificent photographs of famous contemporaries: Victor Hugo, Georges Sand, Alexandre Dumas, the Goncourt brothers, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Courbet, Sarah Bernhardt, and many others. Nadar became a classic of the photographic portrait, having developed many of the techniques that are still the basis for this art form. His atelier on Boulevard des Capucines in Paris became an example of an ultra-modern salon: a building of glass and metal, an elevator and a fountain inside and, most surprisingly, a neon sign, one of the first in Paris. This luminous miracle of its time was specially commissioned by Nadar by Antoine Lumiere, the father of the famous filmmaker brothers.

In addition to the highest artistic level, Nadar's photographic art has always been one step ahead from the technical side, because it is not for nothing that this man combined such diverse talents. His first attempts to use electricity in photography caused bewilderment among specialists. The French photographic society did not believe in the possibility of artificial lighting until Nadar specially took a series of demonstration photographs. But after that, the photographer-innovator managed to take pictures in places that were previously considered inaccessible for photographing. Nadar with his bulky equipment climbed in and managed to remove first the catacombs of Paris, and then the sewers of the French capital. By the way, this series of his works made the dungeons so famous that excursions around the "belly of Paris" became fashionable later. Visitors began their journey on a special sewage trolley, then the women were taken along underground canals on a gondola, and the men walked alongside. Around the same years, by the way, Nadar's friend Victor Hugo described the underground part of the capital in the novel Les Miserables. If in the picture below it seems to you that the human figure looks somewhat unnatural, you are absolutely right. At that time, the camera exposure under artificial light was 18 minutes. During the work, Nadar very quickly came to the conclusion that it was easier to place wax mannequins in the dungeon than forcing the workers to remain motionless for so long.

It is interesting that while studying the "Parisian bottom" (in the literal sense), Nadar was fascinated by the idea of flying over the great city. In 1861 he designed and built the famous Giant balloon. More than eighty thousand people gathered on the Champ de Mars to watch its first flight. The curious were not disappointed: a huge balloon lifted a bunk basket the size of a small house, which contained everything needed for life, including a kitchen. It is believed that it was the "Giant" that Manet portrayed over Paris in the painting "The World Exhibition of 1867". The balloon took off five times, but then, unfortunately, crashed. Nadar and his wife Ernestina were injured, but this did not stop the artist, because flights became an important part of his work - Nadar developed for several years and then patented the world's first method of aerial photography. Technically, it was even more difficult than dragging massive batteries into the narrow passages of the catacombs. For photography at high altitude, the master had to develop special compositions of reagents. But by the end of the 1860s, the photographer finally managed to take the first ever photograph from a height of more than five hundred meters.

After a period of prosperity, Nadar faced financial instability - he failed to make a huge fortune during his rise, and the events of the Paris Commune undermined his position. Therefore, by the end of his life, the great photo artist and inventor was mainly engaged in literary creation. He wrote and published several books in which he spoke about his life and famous friends. The "chief photographer of the 19th century" died in 1910, a few weeks before his 90th birthday. His atelier in Paris, under the leadership of his son Paul, worked for a very long time - until 1939.

And in the XXI century the genre of photography remains in demand. And although it has become as accessible as possible, there are also real masterpieces. So, the traveler takes photographs of the interiors of famous temples of the world, similar to a kaleidoscope.