Introduction: Nadar’s Photographopolis

EDUARDO CADAVA

The world itself has taken on a “photographic face”; it can be photographed 
because it strives to be completely reducible to the spatial continuum that 
yields to snapshots. … What the photographs by their sheer accumulation attempt to banish is the recollection of death, which is part and parcel of 
every memory-image … the world has become a photographable present, 
and the photographed present has been entirely eternalized. Seemingly 
ripped from the clutch of death, in reality it has succumbed to it all the more.

Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography” (1927)¹

I

In a fragment belonging to the posthumous text “On the Concept of History”—a fragment entitled “The Dialectical Image” that cites a passage from André Monglond—Walter Benjamin writes:

If one looks upon history as a text, then what is valuable in it is what a recent author says of literary texts: the past has left in them images which can be compared to those held fast in a light sensitive plate. “Only the future has developers at its disposal that are strong enough to allow the image to come to light in all its details. Many a page in Marivaux or Rousseau reveals a secret sense, which the contemporary reader cannot have deciphered completely.” This historical method is a philological one, whose foundation is the book of life. “To read what was never written,” says Hofmannsthal. The reader to be thought of here is the true historian.²

Although Monglond suggests that history can be likened to the process wherein a photograph is produced in order to hold a memory fast, Benjamin complicates the comparison by introducing a series of comparisons into it. As David Ferris notes, if we include the opening conditional phrase—“If one looks upon history as a text”—the sentence makes three comparisons: “The first, hypothetical, makes history and a text equivalent to one another. The second compares a text to a photographic plate. The third, by accepting the terms of the first hypothetical comparison, would offer knowledge of the initial subject of this whole sequence: history.” “[T]he logic enacted by these comparisons,” he goes on to suggest, “takes the form of a syllogism that can be expressed as follows: if history is comparable to a text and a text is comparable to a photographic plate, then history is comparable to that same photographic plate.”³

But what is properly historical here only reveals itself to a future generation capable of recognizing it; that is, a generation possessing developers strong enough to fix an image never seen before. This is what is so difficult to understand in Benjamin’s account: because the image that emerges was already there but could not be seen either when it was taken or in the intervening time, these images offer different degrees of detail. This is why there can be no image that does not involve a deviation or swerve. In the second entry to Convolute N of his Arcades Project, Benjamin underlines the critical importance of this deviation to the historical aim of this project, while attributing its cause to time. He writes: “What for others are deviations are, for me, the data which determine my course—I base my reckoning on the differentials of time (which, for others, disturb the ‘main lines’ of inquiry).”⁴ To “read what was never written” therefore involves reading the deviations introduced by these “differentials of time,” something that Benjamin had already suggested when, in one of his earliest comments on Baudelaire, he wrote:

Let us compare time to a photographer—earthly time to a photographer who photographs the essence of things. But because of the nature of earthly time and its apparatus, the photographer manages only to register the negative of that essence on his photographic plates. No one can read these plates; no one can deduce from the negative, on which time records the objects, the true essence of things as they really are. Moreover, the elixir that might act as a developing agent is unknown.⁵

If we remain unable to develop these negatives, however, we still may be able to have, as Benjamin says Baudelaire can, a “presentiment of its real picture” (ML, 27), by registering that the dialectical image is to be read in language. What is legible in a dialectical image is a constellation of the then and now, but it is not a matter of the now reading the then; it is a matter of reading the then in the now, or, more precisely, of reading the then now, which is what I wish to do now, here.

I have begun with Benjamin not simply because I wish to put what I will say about Félix Nadar’s memoirs, Quand j’étais photographe (When I Was a Photographer), under the sign of his name, nor simply because he has been one of Nadar’s greatest readers (Benjamin repeatedly cites the memoirs in his writings on Baudelaire and in his Arcades Project), but in order to suggest that, if we have scarcely ever read Nadar’s text, it is perhaps because we have had to wait to be able do so. What would be required for such a reading, Benjamin suggests, is a labor of reading that seeks to trace what has never been written or read, and to follow the wandering, deviating quality of the text, especially because this wandering character has often been what has dissuaded readers from it. As Rosalind Krauss has noted, the memoirs are

structured like a set of old wives’ tales, as though a community had entrusted its archives to the local gossip. Of its fourteen chapters, only one, “The Primitives of Photography,” really settles down to producing anything like a historical account. And although this is the longest chapter in the book, it comes nearly at the end, after an almost maddening array of peculiarly personal reminiscences, some of which bear a relationship to the presumed subject that is tangential at best.

“Perhaps it is this quality of rambling anecdote,” she adds, “of arbitrary elaboration of what seem like irrelevant details, of a
constant wandering away from what would seem to be the point, that accounts for the book’s relative obscurity.”⁶

I would like to suggest that, if the book has remained obscure and largely unread, it is because it is difficult, and this despite its seemingly conversational style. What has remained unread because of this difficulty is the book’s wildly performative character, a feature that makes it at times more impor-tant to register what the text is doing than what it is saying. In addition, the itinerant range of Nadar’s many activities—photographer, writer, actor, caricaturist, and inventor—has encouraged us to think of him as an artist and inventor rather than as a rigorous thinker.⁷ Even in writings that sometimes seem gossipy and capricious, however, we still can register an analytic power that makes this text one of the most exciting, precise, and rich writings on photography we have. Presented in fourteen vignettes, the text comes to us as a series of snapshots-in-prose, each of which offers us an allegory of different characteristics and features of the photographic world: what Nadar calls, in a discussion of his aeronautic experiences, the “photographopolis.”⁸ This photographopolis refers not only to Paris as a city that is entirely photographic—according to Nadar, Paris is not only photographed, but essentially photographic in nature—but to a world that, having become a series of images, is increasingly composed of proliferating copies, repetitions, reproductions, and simulacra. What interests me about the memoirs is not only the itinerancy of a camera that moves from Nadar’s portrait studio to the streets of Paris, from Paris’s catacombs to its aerial photographs of a Paris in transformation, but also the way in which Nadar’s memoirs inscribe within its movement an entire constellation of photographic figures, as if photography itself had traveled into his language. What is remarkable is that, in a text that presumably is a record of his life as a photographer, an account of the history of photography from its beginnings to the time of the memoirs itself, Nadar does not reproduce a single photograph, as if to suggest that a photograph is unnecessary in a text that is photographic in form. Indeed, Nadar’s text performs, within the forms and itinerancy of its language, what it wants to convey to us about the history of photography and about photography itself. The memoirs appear as a machine of repetition, since several of the texts that compose it had already been published by Nadar earlier (although he sometimes alters them in the memoirs). The memoirs thus form a palimpsestic anthology not only of Nadar’s previous writings but also of the texts he cites and recirculates in his work. The text is itself a constellation of then and now that seeks to offer a history of photography in the nineteenth century and beyond. Nadar’s text is not a chronicle, however, because it does not offer a sequence of chronological events, a historical record in which the facts are narrated without adornment, or any attempt at literary style. It is, in Benjamin’s sense, a question of Darstellung—a matter of representation, presentation, performance, and, in a chemical sense that Nadar would have appreciated, of recombination. Written in sections and therefore moving forward in accordance with a series of interruptions, Nadar’s memoirs enact a “method” of representation that proceeds, like a performance, in the mode of digression and detour. Each of his vignettes is therefore an opening onto the reading labyrinth that is at once his life and text. Like Benjamin, he knew that “memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium,” a kind of “theater” in which remembrance is staged and performed.⁹

Nadar stages the entanglement of his life, his text, and the act of remembrance in the very title of his memoirs, When I Was a Photographer. Since we know that he took photographs throughout the entirety of his life, the past tense of the title suggests that the memoirs are written after his death, from beyond the grave. No longer simply alive, but not yet entirely
dead—or rather, at the threshold of life and death, dead but still writing—Nadar writes, but as a “dead man.” In doing so, he suggests that photography names a dispossession that, dividing him from himself, telling us that living and death are inseparable, figures his death by anticipating it. That Nadar always thought of himself as existing between life and death is confirmed everywhere in his writings. In an early review of the paintings exhibited at the Universal Exhibition of 1855 in Paris, for example, and in order to signal that he has left lithography behind for photography, he signs: “Feu Nadar présentement photographe”¹⁰—the Late Nadar, presently a photographer. The already dead Nadar lives on, survives, like a kind of ghost, and, instead of producing lithographs, takes photographs. Suggesting that photographs are taken by the living dead, he lets us know that there is never just one Nadar, even as he inscribes a death within each successive self. Still, as Stephen Bann has noted, in a discussion of another text whose title insists on the past, Nadar’s 1856 Quand j’étais étudiant (When I Was a Student), “Nadar did not by any means relinquish his past. Just as the printmaker, editor, and caricaturist of the 1830s and 1840s was succeeded by Nadar the photographer, so the latter was succeeded in his turn by another Nadar. … That Nadar looked back at the adolescent Nadar in the spirit of communicating his acute sense of the passing of time.”¹¹ Bearing witness to this passing of time by registering the difference between his different selves—the fact of his multiple identities, the fact that he does not remain the same Nadar from one moment to the next, that one Nadar must always give way to another—Nadar suggests the distance between a history that appears in a linear, successive chain of selves and events and a history that cannot erase the past and therefore carries it forward into the present in a more convoluted, nonlinear manner. As he writes in a later 1881 edition of Quand j’étais étudiant, looking back on a past whose significance he cannot retrieve:

In the old casket closed for nearly half a century, one discovers—a vestige without scent or color—the flowers that once lived, the fragments of yellowed papers whose meaning can no longer be represented, lost forever. … Thus I discover in this little old book that had its propitious moment the faded memories, the confused essays of my extreme youth and my adolescence, passed in the old Latin Quarter, before even Bohemia thought of giving itself a name—and I leave the casket open, at the risk that the new air of the present time might succeed in reducing its contents to dust.¹²

There would be much to say about this rather remarkable passage, but I wish to emphasize the identification that Nadar makes between his self, at least his earlier self, and a book, as if this earlier memoir—another “When I Was …”—were indistinguishable from this self, as if the self were a kind of book and the “little old book” a kind of self. If Nadar here offers a figure for his memoirs (a figure that bears the promise and desire of all memoirs: to embody the history of a self), he also associates this book, this self, with a casket, as if to say that all books are a means of burial, a kind of funerary box.¹³ To write one’s memoirs may be less to give an account of one’s life than to give an account of one’s death, even of one’s several deaths. The Nadarian self appears like an old, withered and yellowed set of pages, a collection of “faded memories” and “confused essays,” none of which can any longer be read and all of which will be reduced, in time, to dust. There can be no memoir, in other words, which does not reduce the self to ashes, which does not register the finitude of its subject. In Nadar’s case, this dissolution of the self is legible in the various ways in which the account of his life as a photographer inevitably must include the history of an entire era, even of several eras. Nadar’s title, When I Was a Photographer, not only refers to the period during which Nadar practiced photography—especially because Nadar expands what can be considered photographic—but also points to the When, the era in which he lived. To tell the story of a life, in other words, even part of a life, requires that we also tell the story of the era, the society, the country, and all the relations—personal, historical, economic, and political—in which the life has lived and died, and even survived this death in writing. This is why the wildness of Nadar’s text—“the indistinct pell-mell of facts and dates” that so often seems to inform his writing—seeks to match what he calls in the final section of his memoirs, “1830 and Thereabouts,” the “pandemonium of people and things” he views as the signature of his era.¹⁴ This era bears witness to, among so many other things, inventions of all sorts, advances in science and in all kinds of technology, new modes of transportation and communication, changes in fashion and controversies over religious beliefs, transformations within the political sphere, increased numbers of riots and new techniques for discipline and punishment, the rise of artificial lighting and the proliferation of newspapers and advertisements, new markets and the Haussmannization of Paris, the spread of theater into every corner of society, and, increasingly, the importance and consequences of photography and its images—of its ability to transform the ways in which we view the world, and even inhabit it. In Nadar’s words, “A whole new world is moved in this universal April … everything is again put into question. Paris, heart and brain, is on fire” (W, 204; Q, 331–332).

II

Nadar’s memoirs open with an account, entitled “Balzac and the Daguerreotype,” of the early reactions and responses to the invention of photography. In Nadar’s telling, photography appeared in the form of a series of questions that, challenging all of our presuppositions, ask us to reconceptualize the relations between perception and memory, life and death, and presence and absence. In response to its arrival, people are said to be “stupefied,” “stunned,” “fixed” in place—arrested, that is, as if in a photograph.¹⁵ For Nadar, the introduction of photography transforms everyone into a kind of photograph—perhaps especially when one resists posing in front of a camera. This is why—even though photography, electricity, and aeronautics are for Nadar the premier emblems of modernity, belonging as they do to the innumerable “inventions” produced by what he calls “the greatest scientific century”—nothing is more extraordinary than photography, because it extends the limits of the possible, and responds to the desire to make material “the impalpable specter that vanishes as soon as it is perceived without leaving even a shadow on the crystal of the mirror” (W, 3; Q, 13). That photography requires the existence of such things as phantoms and ghosts is confirmed in what is perhaps the most famous passage in this section, one in which Nadar refers to Balzac’s theory of specters and, in particular, to the spectrality of photographic images. In Convolute Y of his Arcades Project, Benjamin explains that Nadar “reproduces the Balzacian theory of the daguerreotype, which in turn derives from the Democritean theory of the eidola” (AP, 674). Benjamin does not cite his source, but he clearly refers to the following passage from Nadar’s opening vignette:

… according to Balzac, each body in nature is composed of a series of specters, in infinitely superimposed layers, foliated into infinitesimal pellicules, in all directions in which the optic perceives the body.

Since man is unable to create—that is, to constitute from an apparition, from the impalpable, a solid thing, or to make a thing out of nothing—, every Daguerreian operation would catch, detach, and retain, by fixing onto itself, one of the layers of the photographed body.

It follows that for that body, and with every repeated operation, there was an evident loss of one of its specters, which is to say, of a part of its constitutive essence. (W, 4; Q, 15–16)

As Balzac would have it, then, all bodies are made up entirely of layers of ghostlike images. Every time someone is photographed, a spectral layer is removed from the body and transferred to the photograph. Repeated exposures therefore lead to the loss of subsequent ghostly layers. Benjamin makes it clear that he is aware of Balzac’s theory by citing, a little 
later in the same convolute, a passage from Balzac’s own Cousin Pons:

If anyone had come and told Napoleon that a man or a building is incessantly, and at all hours, represented by an image in the atmosphere, that all existing objects have there a kind of specter which can be captured and perceived, he would have consigned him to Charenton as a lunatic. … Yet that is what Daguerre’s discovery proved … just as physical objects in fact project themselves onto the atmosphere, so that it retains the specter which the daguerreotype can fix and capture, in the same way ideas … imprint themselves in what we must call the atmosphere of the spiritual world … and live on in it spectrally. (AP, 688)

As Balzac suggests, photographic images are based on ghostly
images that emanate from physical objects themselves and are then captured by the camera.

Balzac here presents the outline of an eidolic theory of im-
ages. As Benjamin’s comment on Nadar suggests, this theory
had already been elaborated in antiquity in the work of Democ-
ritus and, as he notes in his Berlin Chronicle, by Epicurus.¹⁶ The most extensive and influential account of Epicurus’ writings on the image can be found in Book IV of Lucretius’ De rerum natura. There, Lucretius describes:

the paradoxical nature of simulacra, or, as the Greeks call them, eidola, those images that appear in the mind and for which there are no counterparts in the outside world: projections and dreams, fantasies, and that category of non-existent beings that flit through the air, willy-nilly, drawn from the outermost surface of things … these simulacra are the outer shapes of things that constitute a film they throw off in the world.¹⁷

According to Lucretius, objects are incessantly represented by an image in the atmosphere and therefore appear there as a kind of specter; more precisely, objects are represented by a series of images, by an almost inconceivably rapid sequence of discrete filmic images emanating from the object and serving as a filter for the viewer.¹⁸

Objects and bodies are therefore condensed composites of multiple layers of images; thus, no image is ever closed or identical to itself. This insight holds for all images but is especially legible in the portraits that helped secure Nadar’s reputation as a photographer. These photographs always presume that the image before the viewer is already multiple—and has been from the beginning. Benjamin makes a similar point when he cites Brecht in the Arcades Project: “With the older, less light sensitive apparatus, multiple expressions would appear on the plate, which was exposed for rather long periods of time,” yielding a “livelier and more universal expression.” By comparison, “the newer devices no longer compose the faces—but must faces be composed? Perhaps for these new devices there is a photographic method which would decompose faces” (AP, 687). This decomposition of the face—of the many faces that were photographed by Nadar—seems to result from the accumulation of multiple layers of more or less instant images.
Insofar as the portraits present a temporal stratification of multiple images, none of which is ever just one, the subject’s face is never simply a face but an archive of the network of relations that have helped constitute this particular face and body—the pose it adopts, the clothes it wears, the look it takes, and what it wishes to mime. Nadar himself suggests that the portrait always must bear within it just such a network, however invisible it may remain, and even if its traces are encrypted within the photograph’s surface:

Photography is a marvelous discovery, a science that occupies the highest intelligences, an art that sharpens the most sagacious minds—and the application of which is within the reach of any imbecile. … The theory of photography can be learned in an hour and the elements of practicing it in a day. What cannot be learned … is the sense of light, an artistic appreciation for the effects produced by different and combined sources of light, the application of this or that effect according to the physiognomy that, as an artist, you must reproduce. What can be learned even less is the moral understanding of the subject—that instant tact which puts you in communication with the model, helps you to sum him up, guides you to his habits, his ideas, according to his character, and enables you to give, not an indifferent reproduction, banal or accidental, such as any laboratory assistant could achieve, but the most convincing and sympathetic likeness, an intimate resemblance.¹⁹

However, this intimate resemblance or portrait requires that the photographer be able to read what is not visible on the surface of the face or body of the person before him, “what was never written” in it, but which nevertheless has left behind its traces.

Like the face and body, the photographic portrait is also a palimpsest to be read, a kind of archive; it always bears several memories at once. To say this, however, is perhaps also to say that every photograph is already, in advance, part of a series or network, even if this web of relations remains unnamable and indeterminate and is generally not emphasized, as it is here. Nadar’s understanding of his portraits may even tell us what is true of every photograph: every photograph is already fissured by its own seriality, but a seriality that—like the innumerable ghostly layers that form the skins or films of the body in Lucretius (and later in Balzac)—cannot be understood in terms of succession, because they are constantly separating themselves out of things, even as they condition our perception. This multiplicity and seriality are legible in Nadar’s next vignette, because it, too, is a story of ghostly, photographic repetitions.

III

Nadar opens the second section of his memoirs, “Gazebon Avenged,” by reproducing a letter he presumably had received twenty years earlier, in 1856, from the owner of the Café du Grand-Théâtre in Pau. In the letter, the owner, named Gazebon, claims that a Mr. Mauclerc—“an actor in transit in our city”—has in his possession a daguerreotyped portrait of himself that was supposed to have been taken of him by Nadar in Paris while Mauclerc remained in Eaux-Bonnes. Gazebon writes to Nadar to request that the photographer take a photograph of him from Paris while he remains in Pau, and do so by the same electric process that had produced the image of Mauclerc. He requests that the portrait be taken in color and, if possible, while he is seated at a table in his billiards room. He promises Nadar that he will display the portrait prominently within his establishment and that, because his café receives every day “the best Society, and even a large number of English gentlemen, especially in the wintertime,” this commission will bring Nadar even greater visibility than he already has (W, 9; Q, 19–20).

Nadar claims to “reproduce” the “original” letter here, but it is, of course, only a reproduction in a memoir. Nevertheless, Nadar quickly remembers that this “original” is a reproduction in yet another sense, since it has its own precedent in a letter Gazebon had sent to him two years ago—again prompted by Mauclerc, who was “already then ‘in transit in our city’”—inquiring about the value of a gilded copper engraving of which, according to Mauclerc, Nadar possessed the only other one of its kind. Nadar states that he never replied to this original letter and this time, too, he decides not to answer Gazebon’s more recent request. That this opening scene begins in the oscillation between singularity and repetition, seeing and not seeing, remembering and forgetting, and with a structure of citation that will punctuate the entire story, suggests the repetitions and recirculations that structure the citational character of photography itself—its capacity to double, repeat, reproduce, and multiply what already is doubled, repeated, reproduced, and multiple—and, in doing so, suggests that what is to come will tell us something about the nature of photography.²⁰

Immediately after declaring his decision not to reply to this second letter—this double of the first one—Nadar offers us a twilight scene that will serve as the setting for the rest of the section. In this scene we can begin to read another series of doubling, photographic effects. Nadar writes:

Can you imagine anything more satisfying than those moments of rest before the evening meal, after a long day’s work? Driven from bed before dawn by the preoccupations of work, the man hasn’t stopped acting and thinking. He has given everything he can, without counting, struggling against a fatigue that becomes more and more oppressive:

I will fall tonight like a slaughtered ox,

and it is only at sundown, when the time of liberation rings, the time for everyone to stop, that, the main door of the house finally closed, he gives himself grace, granting a truce, until tomorrow, to his over-exhausted limbs and brain.

It is this sweet hour par excellence when, … restored to himself at last, he stretches himself with delight in the chair of his choice, recapitulating the fruit of his day’s labor. …

Yes, but, even though our main door is closed, the back door always remains half-open, and if our good luck is to be perfect today, he will come to us for some good, intimate, comforting banter, … he, one of those whom we love more than anybody else and who loves us—one of those whom our thought always follows, since their thought is always with us. …

Exactly that afternoon, one of the most beloved and best came to see me, the highest soul with the most alert and clearest spirit, one of the most brilliant foils cited in Parisian conversation, my excellent Hérald de Pages—and what a nice and intimate chat we were having, leaving fatigue and all the rest far behind!—until a visitor is announced to us. (W, 11–12; Q, 23–24)

This remarkable scene takes place at sundown, at the liminal moment between day and night, light and darkness, and therefore within a photographic temporality and topos. Moreover, in this transitional moment, and in the context of several other threshold figures, especially the several doors Nadar mentions, the shift in pronouns—from you to he to I to we—suggests a self that, like Mauclerc, is always in transit, always passing from one self to another, never simply identical to itself, and since, in Nadar’s “photographopolis,” everyone and everything is photographic, the characters in this vignette themselves become moving photographs. The entire scene stages, in the most theatrical sense, a self that, always on the move, can never be located precisely, and at this moment in which the self relaxes, stretches itself—perhaps even across other selves—Nadar makes impossible a determination of whether the allegorically named “Hérald de Pages” (the one who announces writing to come) actually arrives “in person” or is a double of Nadar who simply enters through the always open back door of his unconscious.²¹ Whether Hérald de Pages is a visitor who comes to see Nadar at this twilight hour or an internal “double,” Nadar presents a self whose identity is essentially linked to and dissolved in relation to this other. Divided from itself—because it is inhabited by an other, because, bearing this trace of the other, this self is no longer simply itself—the multiplicity of this self will be confirmed later in the story and in relation to what happens when one enters a photographic space. Moreover, that we have already entered this photographic space is reinforced by the details that will be revealed in the ensuing encounter with the announced visitor.

The visitor is a 20-year-old man. He claims that he has to speak to Nadar and that, although he would have returned until he found him, he felt able to insist on seeing him today because of the connections they already share: the young man’s mother used to work for Nadar’s mother, and they also share a friend, Léopold Leclanché, who recently died. Insofar as mothers are always another name for photography—mothers and photography are both means of reproduction—and mourning is the photographic experience par excellence, Nadar and the young man’s relation is mediated, even before they meet, by photography. That the young man was born in the year that Nadar received the letter from Gazebon requesting that Nadar take his self-portrait from afar is entirely fitting because, as Nadar soon will reveal, the young man has come to ask Nadar to sponsor his new discovery of long-range photography.

After providing Nadar with an account of his experience in the sciences and in several new technological advances, including the velocipede, electronic chronometers, the telephone, and, more recently, photophony, the young man asks Nadar to consider his story:

— Sir, would you admit, only for a moment, as a hypothesis, that, if, by some impossibility (but it is not for me to remind you, especially you, that, pure mathematics aside, the great Arago would not accept the word: impossibility), if, then, a model, any subject whatsoever, were in this room where we find ourselves right now, for example, and on the other side, your camera man with his lens were in his laboratory, either on this floor, or on any other floor above or below us, that is, absolutely separated, isolated from this model of which he is unaware, which he cannot see, which he has not even seen—and which he has no need to see—would you admit that, if a photograph could be taken here, in front of you, under these strict conditions of segregation, the operation thus executed over such a short distance would have some chance of being reproduced over greater distances? (W, 15–16; Q, 30–31)

Although Nadar immediately responds to the young man by stiffening—“I dared not move a muscle,” he says, becoming in this way himself a kind of photographic effect—Pages springs up and exclaims: “So, you say that, across all distances and beyond your field of vision, you hope to take photographs?,” to which the young man replies: “I do not hope to take them, sir; I take them … I haven’t invented anything; I have only encountered. I can take only a small credit there, if at all: that of removing the obstacles” (W, 17; Q, 32–33). The young man then produces a torn page from a review of his experiment, and Nadar and Pages read the following account:

One of the most curious experiments took place yesterday, Sunday, at two o’clock in the afternoon, in the town hall of Montmartre. A very young man, almost a child, Mr. M … , had obtained from the office of the Mayor the necessary authorization for his first public experiments of electrical photography across all distances, that is, with the model beyond the practitioner’s field of vision. The inventor had asserted that, from Montmartre, he would take photographs of Deuil, near Montmorency.

His Honor the Mayor of Montmartre, and several Council members, were present at the experiment, as well as some residents of Deuil, who were to indicate the points to be reproduced.

Several photographs were obtained one after the other,
produced immediately on demand, and everyone recognized the sites reproduced. Houses, trees, people were standing out with perfect clarity.

People warmly congratulated the young inventor, who was trying to escape the great enthusiasm of the crowd with a modesty that increased even more the public interest in this truly remarkable discovery, the consequences of which already appear to be incalculable. (W, 17–18; Q, 34–35)

The allegory of photography that Nadar wishes to stage here increasingly becomes vertiginously self-reflexive: beyond the claim that the young man can photograph what he cannot see—that photography can make the invisible visible—what is remarkable here is that the young man photographs a town called simply “Deuil,” which means “mourning.” In taking a photograph of mourning, the photographer not only takes a photograph of an experience at the heart of photography—mourning may even be another name for photography—but also takes a photograph of photography itself.

In reaction to this photograph, both Nadar and Pages are speechless and stunned, again frozen as if in a kind of photograph, as if this photographic revelation itself transforms them into photographs. This transformation is reinforced in the following remarkable passage, in which Nadar makes it clear that when one enters a photographic space (and, at this point in the story, there is no other kind of space), one always advances as an other; indeed, as multiple others:

Yes, of course, I gave in, I would have given in ten times already if … —if I had not been forcibly arrested by a singular hallucination …

*

As in phantasmagorical phenomena and with the obsession that attends certain cases of double vision, it seemed to me that the features of my noble Hérald and the honest face of the young worker were merging, blending into a kind of Mephistophelean mask from which appeared a disquieting figure that I had never seen before but I recognized immediately: Mauclerc, deceitful Mauclerc, “in transit in our city,” mockingly handing me his electric image, from the country of Henry IV …

And I seemed, myself, to be Gazebon, yes, Gazebon himself, Gazebon “the Gullible” … —and I would see myself in my Café du Grand-Théâtre in Pau, awaiting, from Nadar in Paris, my portrait “by the electric process” and, in the meantime, to kill time, serving a beer to “the best Society, even to Englishmen, seated, if possible, in my billiards room.” (W, 19–20; Q, 37–38)

That every self here becomes someone else, and even more than one other, suggests the continual distortions and displacements from which the photographic subject emerges, but always as an other. In experiencing the other’s alterity, for example, Nadar experiences the alteration that, “in him,” infinitely displaces and delimits his singularity. This movement of disfiguration, linked to the chiasmic plurality of the passage’s interwoven figures, makes it impossible to determine who speaks the rest of the story. Where everyone can become someone else—for example, in the aleatory, ghostly space of photography—no one is ever simply himself. Because figures are always haunted by other figures, are always bearing the traces of the other, they are always themselves and not themselves at the same time. What gets signaled here is not only the structure of photography in general, a structure that names the loss of identity that attends the entry into photographic space, but also a mode of writing that performs at the level of its sentences and words what it wants us to understand. This becomes clearer when, after the young man leaves, Nadar is left to appreciate his performance: he suggests the young man was simply following a script that would permit him to trick Nadar, and his sometimes mouthpiece, Hérald. As he puts it to Hérald:

Notice to what degree our young artist was correct in his entire presentation: his entrance, modest, reserved, his attire standard: all this perfect; the use of sentimental opening lines, the evocation of the two old mothers (which never fails …), the ingratiating exordium drawn from the character of the orator; the voluble list of facts and dates, difficult to verify on the spot, swirling to dazzle us like the balls of a juggler, the compliments, a bit exaggerated, but this always happens: and in order to achieve this perfect whole, think of all the preparations, of all the training! And he’s still so young! (W, 23–24; Q, 44–45)

A theater, Nadar reminds us, is always also a place of memory and anticipation, where what has been is rehearsed and repeated as what is to come. The story ends with a reminder of the citational character of the young man and, by implication, of all of us. We live, Nadar seems to suggest, within quotation marks, in relation to both mourning and photography.

IV

That this citational structure can be linked to the madness of a mimesis gone wild is elaborated in Nadar’s fourth vignette, “Homicidal Photography.” Even within a strange collection of self-reflexive stories, this fourth story is a particularly intense allegory of photography’s capacity to address and enact violence, and of its capacity to be mobilized toward different ends within different contexts. It is also a compelling account of the way in which everything can be viewed as photographic, even the influence that one person can have on another. In it, Nadar tells the story of a pharmacist who, with the help of his wife and his younger brother, murders his wife’s lover. While the story seems somewhat distant from Nadar himself—it is one of the few vignettes that does not present him as its primary character and is not presented directly in his voice, at least not clearly so—it nevertheless encrypts several references to his own personal life and, in particular, to his capacity to influence his younger brother, often negatively. It therefore touches on the sometimes violent force of mimesis, and perhaps even on the murderous character of the photographer himself.

Even if the story did not reference Nadar’s own photo-
graphic desires—along with his relation to his brother, Adrien—it would be difficult to say that it is entirely fictional and, indeed, neither the characters nor the story are invented by Nadar alone. As Jérôme Thélot has noted, Nadar’s readers would have recognized in the story a well-known murder that they would have read about in several newspapers and books, since the particular details and horror of the “Fenayrou Affair” had been widely circulated to the public through the press and various scandal sheets.²² The murder of the pharmacist, Louis Aubert, planned and executed by the Fenayrou couple, with the help of Marin Fenayrou’s younger brother, occurred on May 18, 1882. The murderous trio threw Aubert’s body into the Seine, and it was discovered a few weeks later, on June 7. The crime is sensationalized in the press from that day until the end of the trial, which lasted from August 9 to 12. Only Marin Fenayrou—also a pharmacist, and therefore a double of his victim—is condemned to death; his wife is sentenced to forced labor for life, and the younger brother to forced labor for seven years. Nadar knew all of this when he first wrote his text in 1892²³—especially since many images of the events had circulated, including images of everyone involved in the matter and, indeed, of the scene of the crime itself. Nevertheless, because he does not disclose the names and details of the case until the end of his retelling of the story, the characters appear to be fictional. If he delays any reference to the actual events, it is partly because, instead of wanting to restrict his story to the historical affair, he wishes the affair to be read more generally as a kind of self-portrait not so much of the pharmacist and the criminal—even though in the story these two can be the same person—but of the photographer, and perhaps even of this particular photographer. Indeed, it is because the pharmacist is a figure for the photographer that Nadar can tell us that “the pharmacist is not there” (W, 40; Q, 68).

This identification between the pharmacist and the photographer—and their shared capacity for violence—unfolds gradually. The story opens drily and anecdotally, with a description of a run-down pharmacy in the Madeleine quarter of Paris, and the early pages establish the story’s atmosphere, which is, by turns, melancholic, dreary, desperate, despairing, even suffocating. We learn that the pharmacist’s family had wanted him to be a doctor but that, not succeeding in medical school, he had become a chemist; that he seduces a young girl into marrying him and uses her dowry to set up his pharmacy; that, never able to make ends meet, things are very bleak. He hires an assistant whose situation seems to mirror this desolation and who, for a short time, becomes the lover of the unhappy wife. On discovering her infidelity, the pharmacist creates an elaborate plan to murder the assistant, with the help of his wife and younger brother. Much of the story traces the various ways in which the pharmacist imposes his will on his wife and brother, and also the different forces that act on him.²⁴ In each instance, a suggestion becomes a kind of command, a statement influences another’s actions and thoughts, and this other is molded in relation to the other’s desires.

Despite the elaborateness of the plan—and perhaps because of it—everything explodes when the cadaver is found in the Seine. A photograph is taken of the dead, terribly decomposed body, and its circulation in the press begins to move the crowds who see it against the murderers. The story is therefore also a story about the effect a photograph can have, but this effect has already been at work throughout the story, in all the different ways in which one character imitates, copies, or even becomes, like a photograph, the doubled trace of another one. This is true even of Nadar’s own encrypted relation to the story. Having abandoned his studies in medicine, Nadar is like the pharmacist who, having wanted to be a doctor (or perhaps not wanting to, but instead following the wishes of his parents), is now only a would-be doctor. Moreover, in the same way that the pharmacist manipulates chemicals and drugs in his laboratory and can either cure or poison his clients, the photographer also manipulates substances and chemicals and can produce either a good, lively image or a bad, deadly one. Beyond the fact that Nadar always referred to his photographic studio as a laboratory, he also viewed photography itself as a kind of pharmacy, and often emphasizes all the chemicals he uses in his practice.²⁵

If Nadar is attracted to the story, then, it is because it encrypts several references to his photographic practice, but also to his familial history. Insofar as Nadar focuses on the way in which the pharmacist—ever attended by his younger brother, who, always imitating him, surrenders his identity and agency to him—exerts a controlling influence over his brother, he recognizes his brother Adrien’s own fate, and registers the extent to which his force and influence may have affected his brother. Indeed, Nadar first begins writing his account only a few months after Adrien is committed to a mental institution in 1890, and may have done so not only because he saw in the criminal pharmacist an allegory of the photographer but also because he saw in this story the drama of a younger brother driven to madness because of his inability to resist the elder brother’s force. That Nadar considered the more psychological dimensions of the story is confirmed by his evocation of Hippolyte Bernheim’s theory of hypnosis and suggestion in the postscript that he adds to his tale (W, 53–55; Q, 92–93). We can see here that the suggestive power that Félix has over Adrien is analogous to the relation that exists between the husband and his wife, the murderer and his co-conspirators, and the photograph of the cadaver and the crowd that is mobilized in relation to it.²⁶ The metaphor of this almost compulsory form of mimesis—described as having a crushing force—eventually determines the description of the cadaver in the photographic image:

One month, six weeks, after the evening at Croissy, a sailor
catches with his hook, under the bridge, an unformed mass, a hideous apparition in the silt. …

It is the cadaver of a drowned man in total putrefaction, so abominably fashioned that the human form soon becomes illegible. The limbs had been taken and violently bent against the body: lead chains crush them into pallid turgescence and, thus, this gaunt mass seems like the pale belly of a giant toad. The skin of the hands and feet, all wrinkled, is raw white while the face has taken on a brownish tinge. The two eyeballs, the eyelids turned inside out, like two eggs and as if ready to burst, bulge out of the pallid head: between the lips swollen into folds, the wide-open mouth leaves the swollen tongue hanging, torn into pieces by fish. … The fleshy parts were already saponified; what remains of hair or beard no longer sticks. Punctured many times, the skin of the abdomen, green in places and blue or violet in others, vomits by each of these holes the unraveled intestines, and these hoses float like banners, like the tentacles of an octopus. … Never had decomposition by death resulted in anything more horrible than this heap without a name, this infamous carrion, disemboweled, so deliquescent as to make even a gravedigger faint. (W, 50–51; Q, 86–87)

The body mutilated and deformed by torture, decomposed by the undulating waters of the Seine, and destroyed by the ruinous force of violence, is, according to Thélot, “the physical trace of what the pharmacist suffered, crushed by his fixed idea, what the younger brother suffered, crushed by his older brother, the wife crushed by her husband and her lover, and what the fascinated and furious crowd will suffer in its desire to crush the guilty ones with its obsessional vindictiveness, after having been crushed by its drive to the image. This force of annihilation is therefore the other name of suggestion—as the cadaver is the other name of photography.”²⁷ In this dead body—emerging from the waters of death into the light, exposed to the looks cast on it, immediately followed by the horror of this terrible apparition—in all of this, Thélot notes, we recognize another “hideous apparition”:

the one in the watery solution of the photographer’s basin, the image that trembles under the avid gaze, the imprint on wet paper where the human appearance, arrested by the lens, cadaverized by the shot, and misrecognized by the blind and cold apparatus of the photographic operation, arises deformed, dreary, and crushed. The cadaver caught in the Seine evokes the dead body that appears in the photographic exposure. This cadaver bears the imprints of physical abuse, as the photograph the imprints of what it represents.²⁸

The cadaver is a photograph, and, because of it, we can identify the man whose body has been found, and we can “track down” his murderers. While people try to figure out what happened, the police photograph the horror. The devastated body of the pharmacist’s victim can now be identified with the flat image of itself (with what Roland Barthes would call “flat Death”)²⁹ and, indeed, the fascination with the cadaver
results from the photograph itself. But this identification between the cadaver and the photograph was already antic-
ipated, even if in a displaced manner, in the very moment in which the pharmacist first imagines his revenge, since, at that moment, he himself becomes a kind of photograph, a photographic negative that undergoes a process of enlargement and already has the capacity to kill. As the narrator reports:

Darker than ever, the husband is possessed by a fixed idea; even though he dries up, even though he consumes himself in research, he does not yet know how to find, he will never know how to find, what can extinguish his hatred, this hatred that immediately elevates and reveals him, enlarges him—a negative, a nothing until then—in the eyes of his alarmed wife. All right, finally! Suddenly, here is the man, here is the valiant, terrible one—the one who commands and who is obeyed: the one who will kill … (W, 46; Q, 80)

Like the crime that leaves its traces, photography records an imprint on malleable matter. The wife under her husband’s spell is “inert,” Nadar tells us, “like wax to be molded” (W, 42; Q, 72) and, in this way, she figures the relations of submission that characterize all the relations in the story: that between the younger brother and the older one, that between the pharmacist and his “fixed idea,” and that between the image and everyone who sees it. The image exercises its power and influences the entirety of Paris: “since yesterday, people have been swarming the newsroom of Le Figaro, and all of Paris will pass by there” (W, 51; Q, 88). Nadar expresses an anxiety over the power of the image and, in particular, its capacity to move people wherever it wants to: “but such is the disorder of Justice itself, since this is what it is called, in front of the accursed image of perpetrated murder, that this photographic print ends up sovereignly substituting itself for all the rest: it drives everything” (W, 52; Q, 90). “It is the photograph that has just announced the sentence,” he notes, “the sentence without appeal—death! …” (W, 51; Q, 88).

Here again Nadar simply reports what his readers already would have known. A photograph of the cadaver was taken and the negatives were displayed in the editorial halls with lights behind them. The crowds that view the images are moved to vengeance just as the husband was when he discovered his wife’s affair, and their desire for what they presume to be justice begins with this photograph. What Nadar witnesses here, and what he elaborates elsewhere in his memoirs, is, in Thélot’s words, “the birth of a modern journalism that invents the mutual reinforcement of words and images in its production of contagious opinion.”³⁰ What is perhaps most remarkable in Nadar’s telling of the story, however, is its insistence that this process of contagious imitation or mimesis is itself an entirely
photographic one. This identification between photography and the way in which a person (who, according to the logic of this vignette, is himself or herself already photographic) acts upon another is in fact elaborated in the “Preface to the Second Edition” that the French sociologist and criminologist Gabriel Tarde wrote to the 1895 edition of his Laws of Imitation. There, in a long passage in which he discusses imitation directly in photographic terms, he writes:

Now I am well aware that I am not conforming to ordinary usage when I say that when a man unconsciously and involuntarily reflects the opinion of others, or allows an action of others to be suggested to him, he imitates this idea or act. And yet, if he knowingly and deliberately borrows some trick of thought or action from his neighbor, people agree that in this case the use of the word in question is legitimate. Nothing, however, is less scientific than the establishment of this absolute separation, of this abrupt break, between the voluntary and the involuntary, between the conscious and the unconscious. Do we not pass by insensible degrees from deliberate volition to almost mechanical habit? And does the same act absolutely change its nature during this transition? I do not mean to say that I deny the importance of the psychological change that is produced in this way. But on its social side the phenomenon has remained the same. No one has a right to criticize the extension of the meaning of the word in question as unjustifiable unless in extending it I have deformed or obscured its sense. But I have always given it a very precise and characteristic meaning, that of the action at a distance of one mind upon another, and of action which consists of a quasi-photographic reproduction of a cerebral image upon the sensitive plate of another brain. If the photographic plate became conscious at a given moment of what was happening to it, would the nature of the phenomenon be essentially changed? By imitation I mean every impression of an interpsychical photography, so to speak, willed or not willed, passive or active. If we observe that wherever there is a social relation between two living beings, there we have imitation in this sense of the word (either of one by the other or of others by both, when, for example, a man converses with another in a common language, making new verbal proofs from very old negatives), we shall have to admit that a sociologist was justified in taking this notion as a lookout post.³¹

This passage could serve as the epigraph to Nadar’s vignette, since it articulates the logic that underlies the entire story. In the story, there is not a single moment in which one character is not following the script of another; even Nadar, we discover,
is following, even as he revises, the earlier script of the “Fenayrou Affair.”³² In each instance, the tendency to be influenced by others, to permit oneself to be imprinted upon by ano-ther, transforms the subject into a photographic surface, and
this process of transformation—which in the story touches and drives everything—works to crush and even erase a person’s agency. It is in this way, Nadar suggests, that photography displays its homicidal tendencies. These tendencies also account for why the memoirs are littered with corpses—from the body of Leclanché that serves a mediating function between Nadar and the young inventor of long-range photography to the corpse of the pharmacist lover to the corpse whose body lies in the funeral home scene that opens the vignette entitled “The Professional Secret,” and to the millions of corpses that populate the Parisian Catacombs.

V

When Baudelaire refers in “Spleen ii” to “A pyramid, an immense vault, / which contains more bodies than the common pit. / … a cemetery abhorred by the moon,”³³ he is referring to what, in a passage cited by Benjamin in his Arcades Project, François Porché calls “the ancient ossuaries, now leveled or entirely gone, swallowed up in the sea of time with all their dead, like ships that have sunk with all their crew aboard” (AP, 99). These ossuaries point to another city in the midst of Paris, a city whose inhabitants far outnumber the living beings of the metropolis above: the underground catacombs.³⁴ The creation of the Municipal Ossuary beneath the city corresponds almost exactly to the timing of the Revolution: ordered in 1784 by the Conseil d’État, and opened the following year, the catacombs were meant to relieve the stress on the Cemetery of the Innocents and, even more successfully than the Revolution, created a kind of equality that could not be found above ground. As Nadar writes in his account of his photographic descent into the Parisian underground: “In the egalitarian confusion of death, a Merovingian king remains in the eternal silence next to those massacred in September 92. The Valois, Bourbons, Orléans, Stuarts, end up rotting indiscriminately, lost between the wretched of the Court of Miracles and the two thousand ‘of the religion’ [that is, Huguenots] that were killed on the night of St. Bartholomew” (W, 78; Q, 129). Moreover, he adds, celebrated figures from Jean-Paul Marat to Maximilien Robespierre, from Louis de Saint-Just to Georges-Jacques Danton and the Comte de Mirabeau, all succumbed to the anonymity of the catacombs. By the late nineteenth century, the catacombs contained the remains of nearly eleven million Parisians. In his memoirs, Nadar refers to this underground city as a “necropolis,” a city of the dead (W, 83; Q, 137). Like photography, Paris—as a city that exists both above and below ground—names the intersection of life and death.

Nadar took his camera underground into the catacombs and the sewers in 1861. Much of his account of this work details the difficulties and challenges he encountered while experimenting with electric light. Among other things, Nadar’s underground work literalizes the relation between photography and death that he had already signaled in the earlier vignettes, and that he understands to belong to photography’s signature. Whether the bones are put haphazardly on top of one another or are neatly organized, the catacombs are signs of our mortality:

But the nothingness of the human condition has no lim-
its and the standards of eternity demand even more: these skeletons, all pell-mell, are themselves disaggregated, scattered in such a way as never to be able to be found in order to be reunited on Judgment Day. By the hand of special workers, employed annually for this service, the ribs, vertebrae, sternums, carpi, tarsi, metacarpi, and metatarsi, phalanges, etc., the whole menu of the bones, are pushed back, compacted into more or less cubic masses under the crypts—in jams, as they say here—, and held in front by heads chosen from the best preserved of them: what we call the façades. The art of the excavation workers combines these strings of skulls with femurs arranged in a cross in certain symmetrical and varied arrangements, and our funerary decorators devote themselves to them—“in order to make the view interesting, almost pleasant,” says the good Dulaure. (W, 78–79; Q, 129–130)

Operating with an aesthetics of display, within the effort to aestheticize death, the workers seek to produce a treat for the eyes, a visual pleasure. Moreover, as Christopher Prendergast has noted, Nadar’s lighting sometimes gives “a bizarrely polished look” to some of the skulls, which transports us “back into the world of the grand magasin, as if the skulls were so many shining spectral commodities placed on display.”³⁵

This is not the only reminder of the aboveground city in Nadar’s underground, however. The skeletal remains also recall the masked faces in the opera or theater. These theatrical resonances are reinforced by Nadar’s use of mannequins to represent workers in his photographs.³⁶ As Nadar explains in a passage that Benjamin cites in his Arcades Project:

With each new camera setup, we had to test our exposure time empirically; certain of the plates were found to require up to eighteen minutes.—Remember, we were still, at that time, using collodion emulsion on glass negatives. … I had judged it advisable to animate some of these scenes by the use of a human figure—less from considerations of picturesqueness than in order to give a sense of scale, a precaution too often neglected by explorers in this medium and with sometimes disconcerting consequences. For these eighteen minutes of exposure time, I found it difficult to obtain from a human being the absolute, inorganic immobility I required. I tried to get round this difficulty by means of mannequins, which I dressed in workman’s clothes and positioned in the scene with as little awkwardness as possible; this business did nothing to complicate our task. (AP, 673–674)³⁷

While the mannequins were meant to add to the photograph’s realism, they instead accent the image’s theatricality. Presumably working to order the remains of the dead, they, along with the images in which they appear, evoke the tradition of vanitas, something Nadar himself suggests in his memoirs (W, 80; Q, 132). In this world in which the boundaries between life and death, or persons and things, have begun to blur, the mannequins who push wagons, shovels, and bones in numerous pictures suggest the death-in-life on which Nadar so often insists, the shadowy transitoriness and finitude of all living beings, a finitude whose traces cannot be erased, either in life or in death. This is why Nadar emphasizes the palimpsest-like relation between the underground network of tunnels and the aboveground network of streets. Nadar’s Paris is always double, is always more than one, which is why, like the mannequins which serve as doubles for the workers, it is another name for repetition and citation, and perhaps for photography itself.

VI

In his 1864 book, À terre et en l’air: Mémoires du Géant—parts of which are incorporated into his later memoirs—Nadar explains that his interest in aerial photography grew out of his interest in mapping the city from a bird’s-eye view. When Nadar looked to the skies, however, as when he looked to the sewers and catacombs, he encountered more than anything else his finitude, even as he continued to wish he could exceed it. As he puts it, describing the sensation of being in the air above Paris, “[t]here only complete detachment, real solitude. … [In] the limitless immensity of these hospitable and benevolent spaces where no human force, no power of evil can reach you, you feel yourself living for the first time … and the proud feeling of your liberty invades you … in this supreme isolation, in this superhuman spasm … the body forgets itself; it exists no longer.”³⁸ This passage is rewritten and elaborated even further in Nadar’s memoirs. There, clearly referencing the earlier passage, and emphasizing the play between the soul and the body and the more general experience of liberty, he writes:

Free, calm, levitating into the silent immensity of welcom-
ing and beneficent space, where no human power, no force of evil, can reach him, man seems to feel himself really
living for the first time, enjoying, in a plenitude until then unknown to him, the wholeness of his health in his soul and body. Finally he breathes, free from all the ties with this humanity which ends up disappearing in front of his eyes, so small even in its greatest achievements—the works of giants, the labors of ants—, and in the struggles and the murderous strife of its stupid antagonism. Like the lapse of times past, the altitude that takes him away reduces all things to their relative proportions, to Truth. In this superhuman serenity, the spasm of ineffable transport liberates the soul from matter, which forgets itself, as if it no longer existed, vaporizes itself into the purest essence. Everything is far away, cares, remorse, disgust. How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness drop away from on high—and forgiveness descends … (W, 57–58; Q, 96)

But amid the clouds, and despite the experience of freedom and calm that seems to attend flight, when Nadar looked down at his beloved city, instead of simply feeling that he was “living for the first time,” he registered and experienced a landscape of ruins. The photographs show what he saw: Paris as it existed in the late 1850s; that is, a Paris in transformation because of Haussmann’s efforts to renovate and rebuild the city. Taking off from the Champs de Mars, Nadar’s balloon flight enabled him to glimpse the developments in the northwest of Paris that were meant to accommodate the wealthy bourgeoisie. The picture titled First Result of Aerostatic Photography shows the new roads that were altering the city’s identity, as well as buildings and landmarks such as the Parc Monceau, Montmartre in the distance, and the Arc de Triomphe, all of which were now resituated—and therefore redefined—in the context of Paris’s transformation. Another image shows us the arch at the center of the Place de l’Étoile, which was one of Haussmann’s signature accomplishments (and, because stars belong to the history of photography, this emblem confirms Paris’s photographic character). As Shelley Rice notes:

in the clean sweep of their diagonals, in their geometrical organization, in their focus on crossroads and places of exchange, the photographs of Paris itself are indeed the doubles of the photographs of the underground. … All of Nadar’s documentary images of Paris, whether taken above or below the ground, are about dynamism, circulation, change, and, as a result, about a new, thoroughly modern kind of death.³⁹

But what is this death? This is the question that all photographs ask us to engage, and it can be posed at each step of Nadar’s photographic journey and on each page of his memoirs. Indeed, his encounter with death is legible in the persistence, for more than four decades, with which he remained open to the photographic registration of ruins and death (including those ruins which are the mortal bodies that so often sat before his camera, which is why his studio can also be understood as a mortuary chamber, something he himself suggests in his memoirs). But death is also legible in the disappearance of the places and people that he photographed during this time. The world he photographed—including a Paris that belongs to the past, to yesterday—this Paris no longer exists and it was already, even as he was photographing it, in the process of altering and disappearing. As Baudelaire would write in “The Swan,” registering the transformations that Parisians living in the age of Haussmann witnessed every day, “Old Paris is gone (no human heart changes half so fast as a city’s face).” “Paris changes,” he adds, “But in sadness like mine / nothing stirs—new buildings, old / neighborhoods turn to allegory, / and memories weigh more than stone.”⁴⁰ Suggesting that Haussmann was destroying more than simply objects and space, Baudelaire also indicates that he was erasing and demolishing the repositories of memory-images, the neighborhoods and stones that bore the traces of the city’s history and memories. Paris was now littered with ephemeral ruins, which, in turn, became a kind of lens through which the city could be read and rediscovered. Through its ruins—those of the city, but also those of the people who lived there—Paris redefined itself. The city was transformed by at least three forces of destruction: the Haussmannian destruction, the Prussian bombardment during the siege of Paris, and the Commune of 1871. But the Haussmannian moment was the first step in the direction of demolition and ruin. Haussmann saw himself as a “demolition artist” and he was known as “the Attila of the straight line,” “the Attila of expropriation.”⁴¹ Viewing demolition as part of the great work of progress instead of as the violence it also was, Haussmann sought to break with the past and, in so doing, he destined the now unmoored memories to wander aimlessly through the new metropolis. This is one of the reasons photography—in its capacity to capture moments and places that are in the process of vanishing—became such an important medium during this period. In Benjamin’s words, “when one knows that something will soon be removed from one’s gaze, that thing becomes an image” (ML, 115). This is also why Nadar’s aerial photographs (and not only these) recall the traces and specificity of a particular culture and history, even as they inevitably mark the disappearance, loss, and ruin of this same culture and history. His images signal an act of mourning that remains in love with a city that could be said to have died several times, even if it is still living, even if, in its living, it remains haunted by its past and its deaths. Precisely this survival, precisely this living on, reminds us that things pass, that they change and alter, and this is why, throughout his literary and photographic career, Nadar always remained most interested in, and most faithful to, this process of change and transformation. Indeed, the very law that motivates and marks his writings and his photographs is this law of change and transformation.

In several instances, this law is legible in the technological and scientific advances that arrived with photography and aerostatic flight. This is particularly evident in the section of the memoirs that Nadar devotes to the siege of Paris, “Obsidional Photography.” There, Nadar tells us that, during the Siege of Paris by the Prussian army in 1870, he offered his services as a balloonist and photographer to help transport mail across Paris. At first making regular observational ascents and conveying his findings to the military authorities, Nadar decided it would be more helpful to interrupt the communications blockade ordered by the Germans. He launched his first siege balloon from Place Saint-Pierre in Montmartre and he carried military dispatches, government paperwork, registered mail from officials, and over a hundred pounds of personal correspondence of ordinary Parisians who, until this moment, had remained isolated from the rest of the world. The flight was successful, but it had not solved the entire problem, since although mail could go out, it could not yet come in. Nadar’s solution, inspired by an engineer who comes to visit him in order to discuss his idea for overcoming the problem, is an extraordinary anticipation of the circulation of microfilm across long distances (echoing the long-distance experiments discussed in “Gazebon Avenged”), and even of the sending of compressed zip files.⁴² He writes:

An engineer, employed, if I remember correctly, by a large sugar factory, and since he had never been engaged with photography, it was with all possible reserve, and with his good will as excuse in case he is wrong, that he brings to me, on the off chance that I would be interested, the theory that had crossed his mind.

—Since the question, he says, is how to transport by pigeon the most considerable quantity of messages, I presume that in every major postal center—Lyon, Bordeaux, Tours, Orléans, etc., or even, if necessary, concentrating all services in a single point—everyone brings to the office of outgoing mail his correspondence, written on one side only, with the recipient’s address at the top, written as clearly as possible.

A special photographic studio is installed there under an experienced practitioner.

All the letters brought are placed alongside each other on a mobile surface, in a number to be determined, a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand. A two-way mirror keeps them in place by pressing them down.

This set, once completed, is then adjusted vertically to be immediately photographed at the minimal reduction possible—to the hundredth, the thousandth, what do I know?

Only that, instead of photographing on glass or paper, as with ordinary shots, the operation must be performed simply on collodion, whose substance seems to me the prototypical entity, thanks to its lack of grain, transparency, flexibility, and, above all, thinness.

This micrographic image of an almost zero weight is mounted on one of the quills or claws of the bird, under the usual conditions of dispatch by bird.

Once at its destination, the counter-operation: enlargement of the micrographic image of every missive, amplified to its current format, in order to be cut immediately, folded into an envelope, and addressed to each recipient. (W, 135–
136; Q, 221–222)

Nadar is taken by the idea and he approaches a photographer who specializes in micrography, René Dagron, to see if he is willing to help execute the plan. Dagron agrees and, introduced by Nadar to the head of the Post Office, who approves everything, he immediately sets up his camera, photographs hundreds of letters with a single exposure, and then reduces the photograph to a miniaturized negative that can be carried by pigeons. Within weeks, pigeons are transporting thousands of letters on small rolls of collodion film above the Prussians, then returning home to roost on Paris rooftops. All of this happens, of course, as the contours and landscape of Paris are being transformed by acts of violence on several fronts, as the Prussian bombardment puts the destruction of the capital on view.

In a certain sense, Nadar the photographer, because of his fidelity to the finitude and evanescence of things, already signals and bears the mourning of Paris—this city that, as he always suggested, belongs to death. This is why even the mourning of Paris, the mourning of a Paris that has disappeared and shows the body of its ruins—but also the mourning of the Paris which he knows, even as he photographs it, will disappear tomorrow—is itself destined to pass away, but always in another act of mourning. Benjamin reinforces
Nadar’s sense of Paris’s finitude when, in Convolute C of his
Arcades Project—a section devoted to “Ancient Paris, Catacombs, Demolitions, [and the] Decline of Paris”—he cites Gustave Geffroy’s comments on Charles Meryon’s engravings of Paris
(comments that could be used to describe Nadar’s own photo-
graphs of Paris): “[h]is work as an engraver represents one of the profoundest poems ever written about a city, and what is truly original in all these striking pictures is that they seem to be the image, despite being drawn directly from life, of things that are finished, that are dead or about to die” (AP, 96). But, as Nadar also knew, death is not simply a matter of things disappearing even in relation to the photographic act that would seek to preserve them, because another form of mourning is possible, one in which photographs capture scenes which, although visible today, will disappear tomorrow. Nadar knows that everything passes. The figures and people in his photographs, the sites, the objects, all these are destined to death.

In his 1882 Under Fire (Sous l’incendie), Nadar confirms his sense of the finitude of all things in what is perhaps one of the most remarkable moments in his oeuvre, a dialogue that he stages between himself and death. Simply entitled “Duo” and dedicated to the French poet and writer Théodore de Banville, the dialogue is divided into two parts, with the first part taking place in a library and the second “in the woods.” He had already prepared the path to this dialogue earlier in the book’s first section, “Posthumous Paris,” in which he writes of the devastation and destruction that has besieged his beloved city. There, he writes, “in the midst of this abandon, this silence, before these ruins of yesterday and these ruins of tomorrow, the thought of the Death of Things comes to me.”⁴³ He refers again to the ubiquity of Death in the dialogue when, addressing Death, he states that “in the immense solitude of the plains, in the populous streets of the city, you are always present to me and I accompany you” (SI, 260). Nevertheless, even though he feels surrounded by Death, he asks Death to let him finish the pages he has begun writing, even under Death’s shadow. “Why have you begun?,” Death replies. “Why finish? Leave behind these vain desires. You only have one truth that will never deceive you: to be with me. — Come! / Come! Everything here distracts you from me … around you are books of famous authors whose names I will erase tomorrow. … Against all this rebellion, I will throw my grand shroud of snow. And with one deep layer of cotton I will cover and annihilate everything, forms, colors, noises, and sounds! … Who dares to breathe before me?” (254, 256–257). Toward the end of the dialogue, and despite his acknowledgment of the inescapability of Death, Nadar tells her: “Everything that moves me, everything that pushes me irresistibly toward you by some fatal, algebraic progression, cannot suffice to defend me against the excessive suffering, the intolerable heartbreak, of saying goodbye to those I love,” and she replies, implacably, “you render harsh what for you is the sweetest. Those who you say are yours are mine, not yours: it is through me, and only through me, that you can ever be united with them” (261–262). What this dialogue demonstrates, among so many other things, is the sense of mortality that punctuated Nadar’s very real love of life, that actually encouraged him to take great risks, to permit himself to experience the wonder of friendships, inventions, art and theater, and all the scientific and technological advances to which he was a witness. His strong sense of death and mortality is what gives him the right to live, to fly, and to experience all the joy that is legible in his memoirs.

But this is also why, within the world of Nadar’s photo-
graphs, within his “photographopolis,” there can be no photo-
graph that is not associated with death, and why the sections of his memoirs on which I have touched here are everywhere marked by a sense of death. Whatever the represented thing may be, whatever its theme, whatever its content—and even when death is not shown even indirectly—the thing represented
is still touched by death, by the fact of its passing. Even the sun—from which all photographs take their point of departure—will one day pass, will one day no longer cast its light on the earth. Because photography belongs to the dying sun it also, for Nadar, belongs to Paris, the dying city of light. Paris is the city par excellence of photography; it is a photograph, and within Nadar’s world Paris and photography constitute themselves as the allegory of each other. Nadar thinks of this Paris-Photograph every day. But what happens within his imagination in relation to Paris? What haunts him? What encourages him to focus, like a kind of camera, on the relations among photography, death, and the day and night that touched each of his subjects?

Nadar’s photographs are the indices of his particular vision, the traces of a declaration of love, and, if we listen to the silence of his photographs, we perhaps can hear him say, across this silence, and to the Paris and people he loved, and loved to photograph, even as they were vanishing:

I can only find myself in relation to you, even though I know that, because of this relation, I can never be simply myself. Obsessed with you, and by you, I lose myself in the madness of a single desire: to alter time. I want nothing else than to arrest time, to stop it, to seal it within the surface of a photograph. I want nothing else than to archive and preserve, within a series of photographs, within the series of written photographs that my memoirs are, not only the speed of light but also the night and oblivion without which we could never see, and, yes, the death and mourning without which neither I nor you can be said to live. I want to touch and preserve this passing, this itinerancy which belongs to both life and death, mine and yours, and which offers me a series of shifting reflections, as if in water, in which I can see myself, but as the one who is no longer just myself, as the one who is no longer here.