The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera

The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera

A dazzling, stylish biography of a fabled Parisian photographer, adventurer, and pioneer.

A recent French biography begins, Who doesn't know Nadar? In France, that's a rhetorical question. Of all of the legendary figures who thrived in mid-19th-century Parisâ€”a cohort that includes Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Gustave Courbet, and Alexandre Dumasâ€”Nadar was perhaps the most innovative, the most restless, the most modern.

The first great portrait photographer, a pioneering balloonist, the first person to take an aerial photograph, and the prime mover behind the first airmail service, Nadar was one of the original celebrity artist-entrepreneurs. A kind of 19th-century Andy Warhol, he knew everyone worth knowing and photographed them all, conferring on posterity psychologically compelling portraits of Manet, Sarah Bernhardt, Delacroix, Daumier and countless othersâ€”a priceless panorama of Parisian celebrity.

Born Gaspard-FÃ©lix Tournachon, he adopted the pseudonym Nadar as a young bohemian, when he was a budding writer and cartoonist. Later he affixed the name Nadar to the faÃ§ade of his opulent photographic studio in giant script, the illuminated letters ten feet tall, the whole sign fifty feet long, a garish red beacon on the boulevard. Nadar became known to all of Europe and even across the Atlantic when he launched "The Giant," a gas balloon the size of a twelve-story building, the largest of its time. With his daring exploits aboard his humongous balloon (including a catastrophic crash that made headlines around the world), he gave his friend Jules Verne the model for one of his most dynamic heroes.

The Great NadarÂ is a brilliant, lavishly illustrated biography of a larger-than-life figure, a visionary whose outsized talent and canny self-promotion put him way ahead of his time.
Country USA
Brand CROWN
Manufacturer Tim Duggan Books
Binding Hardcover
ReleaseDate 2017-07-11
UnitCount 1
Format Deckle Edge
EANs 9781101902608

Country	USA
Brand	CROWN
Manufacturer	Tim Duggan Books
Binding	Hardcover
ReleaseDate	2017-07-11
UnitCount	1
Format	Deckle Edge
EANs	9781101902608

The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera

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