Nadar

Nadar (nädär`), pseud. of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (gäspär`-fālēks` trnäshôN`), 1820–1910, French pioneer photographer and writer, b. Paris. Nadar opened a photographic studio in 1853 that became a meeting place for literary and artistic celebrities whose faces were captured in his superb portraits. He conceived the idea of mapmaking and surveying from a balloon, completing his first aerial photographs c.1858. Nadar invented the photo-essay, but his prose essays and novels brought him greater fame in his day than his photographs. His work is preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale.

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Nadar

 orig. Gaspard-Félix Tournachon

(born April 5, 1820, Paris, France—died March 21, 1910, Paris) French photographer, caricaturist, and writer. When his father's bankruptcy forced him to leave medical school in 1838, he settled in Paris and began selling caricatures to humour magazines. By 1853 he had become an expert photographer and had opened a portrait studio. His studies of prominent Parisians such as Charles Baudelaire (1855) and Eugène Delacroix (1855) were exceptional in their naturalness, in contrast to the stiff formality of most portraits of the time. His studio became a favourite meeting place of the Paris intelligentsia and was the site of the first Impressionist exhibit. A tireless innovator, in 1855 he patented the idea of using aerial photographs in mapmaking and surveying, and in 1858 he himself made the first successful aerial photograph, from a balloon. He also wrote novels, essays, satires, and autobiographical works.