A Portrait of Nadar: the visionary photographer with a ardour for flight

On March 20, 1910, Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, alias “Nadar”, died. A determine of the nineteenth century, he left his mark on the nationwide scene due to his abilities as a author, caricaturist, photographer and aeronaut. To fly again to the Nadar years is to find the period that noticed the delivery of the Aéro-Club de France. This is a portrait of a person of his time.

– By Cécilia Angot-Frémont, Administrative and Heritage Director of the Aeroclub de France, Member of the French Ballooning Federation steering committee and Chair of the Historical Commission of the French Ballooning Federation.

Studio {photograph} of Nadar in a balloon basket

Timeline

Nadar’s life in context:

• First hot-air balloon flight: 1783

• First fuel balloon flight: 1783

• Nadar: 1820 -1910

• Invention of images: 1839

• Invention of cinema: 1895

• Creation of the Aéro Club de France: 1898

Jules Verne refers to Nadar in his novels From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and Around the Moon (1869) via the character of Michel Ardan, whose identify is an anagram of Nadar. Gaspard-Félix Tournachon is introduced as an adventurer who desires to go to the Moon. 

Verne additionally mentions Nadar in his e-book Robur the Conqueror (1886) via the character of Robur, an inventor who supported the concept of heavier-than-air flying machines, an thought strongly supported by Nadar.

A life in plural

To draw a portrait of Nadar is to explain a plural, passionate life, within the press (as founder and director of the newspaper L’Aéronaute from 1863-1911), in his caricature drawings, in images, and in ballooning and aeronautics… 

Multi-faceted, Nadar is predominantly remembered for having taken images to new heights, and in addition famend for his portraits on this medium. 

His studio location modified a number of occasions; rue Saint-Lazare and rue d’Anjou and rue des Capucines. This latter, the place he settled in 1860, turned most well-known: Nadar commissioned an enormous signal for the entrance of the constructing – his signature, in purple, like his hair – from Auguste Lumière. Ever forward-thinking, it was right here that he adopted Eugène Disderi’s trend-setting images format of smaller “calling card” photos, a inexpensive and intensely widespread means of immortalising your portrait. Latterly – to assist his dwindling funds – Nadar rented out this studio area for the very first main exhibition of Impressionist portray. 

Nadar’s flamboyant character established him as a widely known determine in Parisian society and among the many inventive thinkers of the period. Because of this community – and his extraordinary expertise for portrait images – the good names of the Romanticism motion and different nineteenth century personalities had been captured on movie: Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, Alexandre Dumas, Gustave Doré, Victor Hugo, Sarah Bernhardt, Franz Liszt, Edouard Manet, Guiseppe Verdi…

Nadar and aerial images

In 1858, Nadar realised the potential of mixing his occupation as a photographer with a ardour for ballooning. He filed a patent for aerostatic images. This patent protected his invention and recognises his place in historical past because the innovator on this photographic course of. 

The first try at aerial images was problematic. He carried out an try aboard a tethered balloon (i.e. hooked up to the bottom), by carrying a photographic digicam. Nadar explains his difficulties in his memoirs (Mémoires du Géant, Dentu, Paris, 1864, p. 83): “There remains the disadvantage of the mobility of my basket, however captive it may be, by all its movements, from back to front, from front to back, from left or right, from top to bottom and from bottom to top, without omitting the roundabouts.” In addition to stability, lighting and growth difficult the method. It is believed that this {photograph} not exists. 

The first aerostatic {photograph} introduced by Nadar was taken ten years later and represented a partial survey of Paris taken aboard Giffard’s tethered balloon. 

He continues:

“The invitation to the lens was more than formal, it was imperative, and whatever the intensity of our absorption, it was pushed to the point of dreaming; in truth one would have had to never open the door of a laboratory not to be immediately struck by the idea of photographing these wonders.”

Despite the tremors and the complex process requiring a long exposure, the foundations of success were there and paved the way for aerial mapping and military reconnaissance. 

Interestingly, Nadar also developed the process of electric light photography (filing a patent in 1861) made public by the exhibition of photographs of the catacombs of Paris.
 

Nadar and the siege of Paris

From September 1870 to January 1871, Paris was surrounded by the Prussian army. 

The land routes blocked, a service of mounted balloons was organised to ensure the transmission of messages and the transport of VIPs out of the besieged city. 

Nadar temporarily closed his photography studio to set up an airmail service. He supplied military balloons to the government by creating a balloon manufacturing workshop at the Gare d’Orléans (now the Gare d’Austerlitz). 

In all, 66 balloons, including those of Nadar, were used to transport mail, military dispatches, passengers including the Minister of the Interior, Léon Gambetta, in order to support the defense of Paris. Nadar’s participation from the skies contributed to maintaining communication with the rest of France and was the first major military operation using aerostation. 

“The Giant” and its place in aeronautical history

Nadar was an avid follower of aviation in all its forms, not just ballooning. 

Following his meeting with the Vicomte de Ponton d’Amécourt, Nadar founded the Society for the Encouragement of Aerial Locomotion by Means of Heavier-Than-Air Aircraft in 1863, with Jules Verne a member as well as Victor Hugo. The association became a place for exchanges on ballooning and in support of heavier-than-air aircraft.

“Calling on all researchers in the hunt for the good discover, this free Association, disinterested in the whole lot, aside from the nice of the Cause, would accumulate the contribution of every one to make it little by little the treasure of all. (…) And I had the honour of founding our Society for the Encouragement of Air Locomotion via heavier-than-air plane.” (From ‘Le droit au vol’, 2nd version, Paris, Hetzel, 1865)

It was via this society that Nadar turned near Clément Ader, an aviation pioneer.

Around this time, Nadar ordered the development of the most important ever balloon, which he named Le Géant (The Giant). Bringing collectively all of the superlatives, the balloon was 40 metres excessive and with a capability of 6,000 m³ and was geared up with a terrace, but additionally a rest room, images studio and press space, with the intention of imposing the concept the balloon might be a method of locomotion and communication.

“I say to myself that, in order to achieve the conquest of the air by heavier-than-air aircraft, to kill the balloons which have caused us to lose, on a false track, for the last eighty years, our richest in acquired knowledge, I will make a balloon – the last balloon! – in such extraordinary proportions that it would realise what has never been more than a dream in the American newspapers:  a balloon as high as two-thirds of the Notre-Dame towers; – who, in his two-storey wicker house, would carry thirty-five, forty passengers with the simple lighting gas, and more than a hundred with the pure hydrogen gas.” (From ‘Le droit au vol’, 2nd version, Paris, Hetzel, 1865)

The Giant balloon

The Giant made 5 flights between 1863 and 1867. 

The first happened on the Champs de Mars in Paris on 4 October 1863 and attracted 200,000 folks. 

On 18 October 1864, after taking off from Paris, the fuel balloon introduced its passengers to Belgium, however with a dramatic touchdown. The passengers and Nadar who was piloting sustained accidents. The accident was reported within the press and thus hindered the event of air balloon transport. Due to mounting debt, Nadar offered the balloon after simply 5 flights.

Fun truth

In Belgium, the metallic crowd management obstacles used at public occasions are known as “Nadar barriers”. This harks again to the 1864 demonstration of The Giant in Brussels, when, in an effort to handle the gang current, the authorities put in detachable metallic obstacles to make sure the balloon and its passengers weren’t overrun. “Nadar barrier” nonetheless stays their identify to at the present time, over a century and a half later! 

In conclusion

A visionary and a jack-of-all-trades, Nadar threw himself into the developments and debates of his period. 

His studio turned a hub for inventive and mental Paris. He revolutionised photographic processes in quite a few methods and notably via the invention of aerial images. Before the delivery of cinema, he additionally explored the shifting picture, a elementary idea for cinema.

As the wave of aeronautical experimentation swept the world over, Nadar introduced himself as a fervent defender of heavier-than-air flight. 

His ardour for aeronautics endured till the very finish of his life. When Louis Blériot crossed the Channel in 1909, Nadar despatched the triumphant pilot a telegram: “Moved by gratitude for the joy with which your triumph has just filled the antediluvian of the ‘heavier than air’ before his eighty-nine years are underground.” Nadar died only a few months later.  

Image credit: BNF