Archive Texts: Nadar's "Quand j'étais photographe" (1900)

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Archive texts:
History of Photography

Quand j'étais photographe (When I Was a Photographer) (1900)

About Quand j'étais photographe

The first edition of Nadar's autobiography, Quand j'étais photographe (When I Was a Photographer) was published in Paris by Ernest Flammarion in 1900, when its author had reached the ripe age of 80. Immediately popular in France as both a gossipy commentary on major French cultural figures and as a quirky social history of its time, it has been often reprinted in French, most recently by Editions Seuil in its l'école des lettres series of paperbacks, with a preface and notes by Jean-François Bory (Seuil: Paris, 1994). We offer here five chapters, a substantial portion (over one-third) of the complete text, in the original French.

Quand j'étais photographe is a first-person account of photography's emergence as a major cultural force, written by a pioneer who had contributed to its development with significant and successful experiments in aerial photography (via hot-air ballooning, of which he was an ardent advocate) and underground photography (in the Parisian catacombs, via flash). Those exploits added to his fame, but his bread-and-butter work was studio portraiture. Nadar was, arguably, the first major celebrity portraitist to become a celebrity himself, and inarguably one of the handful who made the photographic representation of the famous, gifted, and powerful into a major function of his medium. -- A. D. C.

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