Homme phototypique

Abstract

Abstract If Paris is to be considered the heart and brain of 19th-century France, then its pulse was surely Nadar's atelier on the Boulevard des Capucines. No single individual of that special milieu of mid-century Romantics and bohemians was better suited in temperament and artistic spirit to preside here than the many-sided, multi-talented, legendary character Nadar himself. He was renowned not only as the photographer par excellence who first elevated the camera over the Parisian rooftops with a balloon, and lowered it to capture images of the city's catacombs, but also as a writer, cartoonist, inventor, entrepreneur, political activist and professional eccentric. He revelled in all these roles, and his biography reads as though it were the creation of Balzac or Murger. In Nadar we have the prototypical, photo typical 19th-century image of the homme artistique, in the Balzacian sense of the phrase, a recorder who is also a creator, a soul on fire who amalgamates the best qualities of adolescence and genius.