Overview

Félix Nadar took the first aerial photograph in 1858, so the story goes. The evidence, Emily Doucet notes, is mixed. In Inventing Nadar, Doucet analyzes the historical and material production of the nineteenth-century Parisian photographer’s famous and numerous photographic firsts. Focusing on these oft-labeled groundbreaking elements of his career, she deconstructs Nadar’s legacy as a prime protagonist in the history of photography by interrogating the media techniques used to construct his invention narratives. Doucet highlights this highly mediated process as one that canonized novel applications of photography as discrete techniques with single authors and inventors. Looking to this process of mediation through the institutions and individuals that shaped Nadar’s archives, Doucet unpacks assumptions of Nadar as a master of early photography and shows how the medium is enmeshed in larger histories of media, science, and technology. The result is both a new account of Nadar’s place in photographic history and a critical study of how stories of innovation take shape.

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9781478033721

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Reviews

“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

“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

Author Information

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

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