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.
List of Illustrations vii
Introduction. “Who Do You Think Is the Greatest Photographer in the World?” 1
1. Collecting the Ideas in the Air: The First Aerial Photograph 16
2. Patent Priorities: The First Photograph by Electric Light 44
3. Sound Reproductions: The First Photographic Interview 67
4. Illuminating Infrastructures: The First Photographs Underwater and Underground 91
5. When I Was a Photographer, or the History of Photography in Photographic Firsts 121
Epilogue. The History of Photography, as Told to Me by Nadar 139
Acknowledgments 153
Notes 157
Bibliography 197
Notes 217
