At eight o’clock one morning in either 1838 or 1839 – the time of day is known but the year uncertain – the inventor Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre set a camera obscura in position at one of the windows of 4 Rue Sanson, in the 11th arrondissement in Paris. He focused the lens out over the rooftops and down into Boulevard du Temple below. A copper plate that had been coated with silver was then exposed to the light entering the camera obscura. Using mercury fumes as a developing agent, Daguerre managed to fix the resulting image on to the copper plate. The exposure time for Daguerre’s primitive prototype camera was around ten minutes. This was far too slow for the people and horse-drawn carriages that travelled up and down Boulevard du Temple to register; they appear merely as indistinct blurs. But one man, who had stopped to have his shoes shined, remained static long enough for his image to appear on Daguerre’s photograph. The indistinct shapes of other figures can also be made out: people who lingered long enough for their presence to be detected, just as ghostly forms. Only the man having his shoes shined appears fully formed and fully recognisable, thus becoming the first person to appear in a photograph. His form is so distinct that some historians of photography have even wondered if he was deliberately placed there by Daguerre. Whether intentional or not, his presence illustrated the great potential of photography: its capacity to fix on to glass, and then paper, images of the human form, to make permanent and available to all images that artists had been viewing through the lenses of their camera obscura for centuries.
67. The first Daguerreotype, Louis Jacques Daguerre's image of Boulevard du Temple in Paris, taken in either 1838 or 1839.
68. The unknown man having his shoes shined on Boulevard du Temple. Perhaps the first human beings ever to appear in a photograph.
The photographic portrait was a profoundly revolutionary medium. Whereas the painted portrait had always been beyond the reach of the vast majority of people, the rapid refinement and evolution of photographic processes made the photograph, and then the camera itself, available to almost everyone. Photography made the human image not just permanent but also transmittable; it allowed living generations to look into the eyes of their ancestors and know that their descendants would be able to do likewise. But in the hands of artists the camera could do more than make a visual record.
Among the first to grasp that the photographic portrait had the capacity to capture the inner character of the sitter was Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, known to the public as Nadar, a nickname from his youth that had stuck. Nadar was a caricaturist, novelist and publisher, as well as a photographer. Perhaps above all, he was an inveterate showman, self-publicist and a figure of incredible energy and near-limitless enthusiasm. These qualities and his many talents had made him a feature of Parisian society. His fame was such that his friend the writer Victor Hugo could write nothing but the name Nadar on letters to him and be confident that they would safely arrive at his photographer’s studio on Boulevard des Capucines. Using his society contacts and the recently developed wet-plate collodion method, Nadar became one of the first true masters of portrait photography. (The collodion method reduced the exposure time to around thirty seconds, rather than the minutes required by the daguerreotype, which it rapidly supplanted.) Experimenting with lighting, backdrops and clothing, in a more relaxed and informal atmosphere, the new process enabled Nadar to capture something of the inner personality of his subjects.1 His photo portraits of the novelists Charles Baudelaire and Alexandre Dumas and the great actress Sarah Bernhardt were among the greatest works to come out of his studio.
Having been born at the height of Europe’s age of urbanisation – a phenomenon that took place later on the Continent than in Britain – the other obvious subject for the new technology was the city itself. Paris was then a city in the midst of a transformation that was radical, comprehensive and as destructive as it was creative. The camera was conscripted to record the death of one Paris and the birth of the other. In the rush towards modernity, old medieval Paris was incrementally obliterated week by week; from the 1850s onwards, whole neighbourhoods were demolished and replaced by a planned city. This process of creative destruction was called Haussmannisation, derived from the name of the ruthless but brilliant visionary who directed it, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann.
69. Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, an early pioneer of portrait photography, set out to capture something of the inner character of his celebrity subjects, as here in his portrait of the actress Sarah Bernhardt (c. 1864).
70. The photographer Charles Marville captured some of the last images of Paris before the medieval city was demolished in the vast programme of rebuilding known as Haussmannisation.
A well-connected bureaucrat, Haussmann had been an early and trusted ally of Louis-Napoleon, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. Haussmann had backed the right horse. Louis-Napoleon rose to become President of the Second Republic and then Emperor Napoleon III. He rewarded Haussmann by giving him extraordinary powers to force through his plans for the new capital. The essentially medieval city that was to be wiped off the map in the process was dank and dark, into which, so it was said, neither fresh air nor sunlight was able to penetrate.
Before that Paris faded into history, however, the photographer Charles Marville attempted to record its narrow, crooked streets and decaying buildings, the city he had known as a child (his own family home was demolished as part of the rebuilding programme). As its population had rocketed to over a million, Paris had become a city in which festered all the social problems that could be found in the slums of contemporary Manchester or New York. Although less industrial and more medieval in character, there was little romantic about the city, and there is remarkably little that is romantic about many of Marville’s stunning images. His later photographs, commissioned by the Paris Department of Historic Works itself, offer a visual record of both the old capital and the mammoth building works then taking place. Many of his more memorable images are of the process of transition, the old city reduced to rubble, the new metropolis still under construction, as yet unborn.
The Paris that emerged from Haussmann’s building programme was a hugely expanded city. Around 20,000 buildings had been demolished and around 30,000 new structures erected. By some estimates the population had doubled, but the human cost of Haussmannisation had been enormous. Thousands of poor Parisians had been forced out of the city, their homes demolished and replaced by government offices or new residential districts aimed at the middle classes, and in which the apartments were beyond their financial reach. Such unfortunates were exiled to the growing suburbs. The new city was the Paris we know today, with its sweeping boulevards and elegant, uniform apartment buildings. The photographer who took the most striking images of this reborn metropolis was Nadar, who left his studio and took his camera into the skies above Paris. As well as being the great photo portraitist of his age, Nadar was also one of the most energetic promoters of aviation and a founder of the Society for the Promotion of Heavier than Air Locomotion. In 1858 he recognised the possibility of bringing two transformative technologies together: the camera and the hot-air balloon.
By the 1850s balloons were far more reliable than the primitive Montgolfier balloon that had crashed into Cairo’s Ezbekiyah Square during Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt. Nadar used a tethered balloon, sited near the Arc de Triomphe, raised to an altitude of 1,600 feet. From this platform he took the first ever aerial photographs. Paris, as seen from the air, became one of the iconic images of nineteenth-century modernity, as only from above could the sheer scale of Haussmann’s creation be comprehended.
71. A series of aerial views of the Arc de Triomphe, Paris, taken by Nadar from a hot-air balloon sometime in the 1860s.
