Inventing Nadar

Emily Doucet is a historian of photography and visual culture. She publishes widely in both scholarly and popular venues.

“This beautifully researched and written book explores the famous French photographer Nadar, his claims to innovation and capacity for self-promotion. But it is so much more: photography and Nadar here become prisms through which to think about the materiality and experience of technological innovation in the mid nineteenth century. Inventing Nadar demonstrates the uncontainability of ‘history of photography’ as a concept, and the critical role of photographs in historical thinking.”—Elizabeth Edwards, author of The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885-1918“A dazzling exploration of Nadar’s ‘firstness.’ With delightful clarity this firstness is revealed to be the product of a magical im-mediation and also the labor of mediation. Nadar’s achievements were not simply the triumph of technical innovation but the complex work of publicity, narration, and mixed media. Doucet’s archival researches uncover the myths that sustained Nadar but also our deep desire for such myths.”—Christopher Pinney, editor of Citizens of Photography: The Camera and the Political Imagination

• List of Illustrations viiIntroduction. “Who Do You Think Is the Greatest Photographer in the World?” 11. Collecting the Ideas in the Air: The First Aerial Photograph 162. Patent Priorities: The First Photograph by Electric Light 443. Sound Reproductions: The First Photographic Interview 674. Illuminating Infrastructures: The First Photographs Underwater and Underground 915. When I Was a Photographer, or the History of Photography in Photographic Firsts 121Epilogue. The History of Photography, as Told to Me by Nadar 139Acknowledgments 153Notes 157Bibliography 197Notes 217