Nadar's Photographopolis - Cadava

8/9/2019 Nadar's Photographopolis - Cadava

1/23Nadar (Gaspard-Flix Tournachon).Self-Portrait , ca. 1855. Salted


2/23

Nadars PhotographopolisEDUARDO CADAVA

The world itself has taken on a photographic face; it can be photo - graphed 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 Historya fragment entitled The Dialectical Image that cites a pas-sage from Andr MonglondWalter Benjamin writes,

If one looks upon history as a text, then what is valuable in it iswhat a recent author says of literary texts: the past has left inthem images which can be compared to those held fast in a lightsensitive plate. Only the future has developers at its disposalthat are strong enough to allow the image to come to light in allits details. Many a page in Marivaux or Rousseau reveals a secretsense, which the contemporary reader cannot have decipheredcompletely. This historical method is a philological one, whosefoundation is the book of life. To read what was never written,

says Hofmannsthal. The reader to be thought of here is the truehistorian. 2

Although Mongland suggests history can be likened to the processwherein a photograph is produced in order to hold a memory fast,Benjamin complicates the comparison by introducing a series of com-parisons into it. As David Ferris notes, if we include the opening con-ditional phraseIf one looks upon history as a textthe sentencemakes three comparisons: The first, hypothetical, makes history anda text equivalent to one another. The second compares a text to a photo-graphic plate. The third, by accepting the terms of the first hypotheticalcomparison, would offer knowledge of the initial subject of this wholesequence: history. [T]he logic enacted by these comparisons, Ferris


3/23

to a photographic plate, then history is comparable to that same photo-graphic plate. 3

But what is properly historical here reveals itself only to a futuregeneration capable of recognizing it; that is, a generation possessingdevelopers strong enough to fix an image never seen before. This iswhat is so difficult to understand in Benjamins account: because theimage that emerges already was there but could not be seen eitherwhen it was taken or in the intervening time, these images offer dif-ferent degrees of detail. This is why there can be no image that does

not involve a deviation or swerve. In the second entry to ConvoluteN of his Arcades Project , Benjamin underlines the critical impor-tance of this deviation to the historical aim of his project, whileattributing its cause to time. He writes, What for others are deviationsare, for me, the data which determine my courseI base my reckon-ing on the differentials of time (which, for others, disturb the mainlines of inquiry). 4 To read what was never written therefore involvesreading the deviations introduced by these differentials of time,something Benjamin already had suggested when, in one of his earli-est comments on Baudelaire, he wrote,

Let us compare time to a photographerearthly time to a photog-rapher who photographs the essence of things. But because of the nature of earthly time and its apparatus, the photographermanages only to register the negative of that essence on his pho-tographic plates. No one can read these plates; no one can deducefrom the negative, on which time records the objects, the trueessence of things as they really are. Moreover, the elixir thatmight 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 ( W , 27), by registering that the dialectical image is to

be read in language. What is legible in a dialectical image is a constel-lation of the then and nowbut it is not a matter of the now reading thethen; 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 whatI will say about Flix Nadars memoirs, Quand jtais photographe(My Life as a Photographer), under the sign of his name, nor simply

because he has been one of Nadars greatest readers (Benjamin repeat-edly cites the memoirs in his writings on Baudelaire and in hisArcades Project ), but in order to suggest that, if we have scarcely everread Nadars text, perhaps this is because we have had to wait to be


4/23

written or read and to follow the wandering, deviating quality of thetext, especially because this wandering character often has been whatdissuaded readers from it. As Rosalind Krauss notes, the memoirs are

structured like a set of old wives tales, as though a communityhad entrusted its archives to the local gossip. Of its fourteenchapters, only one, The Primitives of Photography, really set-tles down to producing anything like a historical account. Andalthough this is the longest chapter in the book, it comes nearlyat the end, after an almost maddening array of peculiarly per-sonal reminiscences, some of which bear a relationship to thepresumed subject that is tangential at best.

Perhaps it is this quality of rambling anecdote, she adds, of arbi-trary elaboration of what seem like irrelevant details, of a constantwandering away from what would seem to be the point that accountsfor the books relative obscurity. 6

On the contrary, it is perhaps the itinerant range of Nadars activitiesphotographer, writer, actor, caricaturist, and inventorthat hasencouraged us to think of him as an artist rather than as a rigorousthinker. 7 Even in writings that sometimes seem gossipy and capri-cious, we still can register an analytic power that makes this text one of the most exciting and exact writings on photography we have. Presentedin fourteen vignettes, the text comes to us as a series of snapshots-in-prose, each of which offers an allegory of different characteristicsand features of the photographic worldwhat Nadar calls, in a dis-cussion of his aeronautic experiences, the photographopolis. 8 Thisphotographopolis refers not only to Paris as a city that is entirely pho-tographicaccording to Nadar, Paris is not only photographed butessentially photographic in naturebut to a world that, having becomea series of images, is increasingly composed of proliferating copies,repetitions, reproductions, and simulacra. The memoirs even appear asa machine of repetition: several of the texts the work comprisesalready had been published by Nadar (although he sometimes altersthem in the memoirs). The memoirs thus form a palimpsestic anthol-ogy of not only Nadars previous writings but of the texts he cites andrecirculates in his work. The text is itself a constellation of then andnow that seeks to offer a history of photography in the nineteenth cen-tury and beyond. Nadars text is not a chronicle, however, because itdoes not offer a sequence of chronological events, a historical recordin which the facts are narrated without adornment, or any attempt atliterary style; it is, in Benjamins sense, a question of Darstellung a matter of representation, presentation, performance, and, in a chem-


5/23

a series of interruptions, Nadars memoirs enact a method of repre-sentation that proceeds, like a performance, in the mode of digressionand detour. Each of his vignettes is therefore an opening onto the read-ing labyrinth that is at once his life and text. Like Benjamin, he knewthat memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather amedium, a kind of theater in which remembrance is staged andperformed. 9

II.Nadars memoirs open with an account, entitled Balzac and theDaguerreotype, of the reactions and responses to the invention of photography. In Nadars telling, photography appeared in the form of a series of questions that, challenging all of our presuppositions, askus to reconceptualize the relations between perception and memory,life and death, and presence and absence. In response to its arrival,people were stupefied, stunned, fixed in placearrested as if ina photograph. 10 For Nadar, the introduction of photography transformseveryone into a kind of photographperhaps especially when oneresists posing in front of a camera. This is whyeven though photog-raphy, electricity, and aeronautics are for Nadar the premier emblemsof modernity, belonging as they do to the innumerable inventionsproduced by what he calls the greatest scientific centurynothingis more extraordinary than photography, because it extends the limitsof the possible and responds to the desire to make material the impal-pable specter that vanishes as soon as it is perceived, without leavinga shadow on the crystal of the mirror (ML, 8; Q , 13). That photog-raphy requires the existence of such things as phantoms and ghosts isconfirmed in what is perhaps the most famous passage in this section,one in which Nadar refers to Balzacs theory of specters and, in par-ticular, to the spectrality of photographic images. In Convolute Y of his Arcades Project , Benjamin explains that Nadar reproduces theBalzacian theory of the daguerreotype, which in turn derives from theDemocritean theory of the eidola (AP , 674). Benjamin does not citehis source, but he clearly refers to the following passage from Nadarsopening vignette:

According to Balzac, each body in nature is composed of a seriesof specters, in infinitely superimposed strata, foliated in infini-tesimal pellicules, in all directions in which the optic perceivesthe body. Since man is unable to createthat is, to constitute

from an apparition, from the impalpable, a solid thing, or tomake a thing from nothing every Daguerrian operation wouldcatch detach and retain by applying onto itself one of the layers


6/23

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 portion of its constitutive essence. (ML, 9; Q , 1516)

As Balzac would have it, then, all bodies are made up entirely of layersof ghostlike images. Every time someone is photographed, a spectrallayer is removed from the body and transferred to the photograph.Repeated exposures therefore lead to the loss of subsequent ghostlylayers. Benjamin makes clear that he is aware of Balzacs theory byciting, a little later in the same convolute, a passage from Balzacs ownCousin Pons :

If anyone had come and told Napoleon that a man or a buildingis incessantly, and at all hours, represented by an image in theatmosphere, that all existing objects have there a kind of specterwhich can be captured and perceived, he would have consignedhim to Charenton as a lunatic. . . . Yet that is what Daguerres dis-covery proved . . . just as physical objects in fact project them-selves onto the atmosphere, so that it retains the specter whichthe daguerreotype can fix and capture, in the same way ideas . . .

imprint themselves in what we must call the atmosphere of thespiritual world . . . and live on in it spectrally . (AP , 688)

Nadar (Gaspard-FlixTournachon). Charles Baudelaire , before March1855. Salted paper print.Muse dOrsay, Paris.Reproduction photo:Patrice Schmidt. Runiondes Muses Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.


7/23

captured by the camera.Balzac here presents the outline of an eidolic theory of images.

As Benjamins comment on Nadar suggests, this theory already had been elaborated in antiquity in the work of Democritus and, asBenjamin notes in his Berlin Chronicle , by Epicurus. 11 The mostextensive and influential account of Epicuruss writings on the imagecan be found in the fourth book of Lucretiuss De rerum natura . ThereLucretius describes

the paradoxical nature of simulacra, or, as the Greeks call them,eidola, those images that appear in the mind and for which thereare no counterparts in the outside world: projections anddreams, fantasies, and that category of non-existent beings thatflit through the air, willy-nilly, drawn from the outermost surfaceof things . . . these simulacra are the outer shapes of things thatconstitute a film they throw off in the world. 12

According to Lucretius, objects are incessantly represented by animage 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 imagesemanating from the object and serving as a filter for the viewer. 13

Objects and bodies are therefore condensed composites of multiplelayers of images; thus, no image is ever closed or self-identical to itself.This insight holds for all images but is especially legible in the por-traits that helped secure Nadars reputation as a photographer. Thesephotographs always presume that the image before the viewer isalready multipleand has been from the beginning. Benjamin makesa similar point when he cites Bertolt Brecht in the Arcades Project :With the older, less light sensitive apparatus, multiple expressionswould appear on the plate, which was exposed for rather long periodsof time, yielding a livelier and more universal expression. By com-parison, the newer devices no longer compose the facesbut mustfaces be composed? Perhaps for these new devices there is a photo-graphic method which would decompose faces ( AP , 687). This decom-position of the faceof the many faces that were photographed byNadarseems to result from the accumulation of multiple layers of more-or-less instant images. Insofar as the portraits present a temporalstratification of multiple images, none of which are ever just one, thesubjects face is also never simply a face but an archive of the networkof relations that have helped constitute this particular face and bodythe pose it adopts, the clothes it wears, the look it takes, and what itwishes to mime. Nadar himself suggests that the portrait always must


8/23

Photography is a marvelous discov-ery, a science that occupies the high-est intelligences, an art that sharpensthe most sagacious mindsand theapplication of which is within thereach of any imbecile. . . . The theoryof photography can be learned in anhour and the elements of practicingit in a day. What cannot be learned . . .

is the sense of light, an artisticappreciation for the effects produced by different and combined sources of light, the application of this or thateffect according to the physiog nomythat, as an artist, you must repro-duce. What can be learned even lessis the moral understanding of thesubjectthat instant tact whichputs you in communication with themodel, 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, banalor accidental, such as any laboratory assistant could achieve,

but the most convincing and sympathetic likeness, an intimateresemblance. 14

But, Nadar suggests, this intimate resemblance or portrait requires thatthe photographer be able to read what is not visible on the surface of theface or body of the person before him, what was never written in it

but nevertheless has left behind its traces.

Like the face and body, the photographic portrait is also a palimpsestto be read, a kind of archive; it always bears several memories at once;it is never closed. To say this, however, is perhaps also to say thatevery photograph is already, in advance, part of a series or network,even if this web of relations remains unnamable and indeterminateand is generally not emphasized, as it is here. Nadars understandingof his portraits may even tell us what is true of every photograph:every photograph is already fissured by its own seriality, but a serialitythatlike the innumerable ghostly layers that form the skins or filmsof the body in Lucretius (and later in Balzac)cannot be understood

in terms of succession, because they are constantly separating themselvesout of things, even as they condition our perception. This multiplicityand seriality are legible in Nadars next vignette because it too is a story

Nadar (Gaspard-FlixTournachon). Pierrot the Photographer , 18541855.Salted paper print. MusedOrsay, Paris. Reproductionphoto: Herv Lewandowski.Runion des MusesNationaux/Art Resource, NY.


9/23

III.Nadar opens the second section of his memoirs, Gazebon Avenged,

by reproducing a letter he presumably had received twenty years ear-lier, in 1856, from the owner of the Caf du Grand-Thtre in Pau. Inthe letter, the owner, named Gazebon, claims that a M. Mauclercan actor in transit in our cityhas in his possession a daguerreo-typed portrait of himself that was supposed to have been taken byNadar in Paris while Mauclerc remained in Eaux-Bonnes. Gazebonwrites to Nadar to request that the photographer take a photograph of him from Paris while he remains in Pau and to do so by the same elec-tric process that had produced the image of Mauclerc. He requests thatthe portrait be taken in color and, if possible, while he is seated at atable in his billiards hall. He promises Nadar that he will display theportrait prominently within his establishment and that, because hiscaf is frequented by the best Society, including a large number of English gentlemen and their ladies, this commission will bring Nadareven greater visibility than he already has (ML, 11; Q , 1920).

Nadar claims to reproduce the original letter, but it is, of course,only a reproduction in a memoir. Nevertheless, Nadar quickly remem-

bers that this original is a reproduction in yet another sense, because ithas its own precedent in a letter Gazebon had sent to him two yearsearlieragain prompted by Mauclerc, who was already then in tran-sit in our cityinquiring about the value of a gilded copper engrav-ing of which, according to Mauclerc, Nadar possessed the only otherone of its kind. Nadar states that he never replied to the original letter,and this time, too, he decides not to answer Gazebons more recentrequest. That this opening scene begins in the oscillation betweensingularity and repetition, seeing and not seeing, remembering andforgetting, and with a structure of citation that will punctuate theentire story suggests the repetitions and recirculations that structurethe citational character of photography itselfits capacity to double,repeat, reproduce, and multiply what already is doubled, repeated,reproduced, and multipleand, in doing so, suggests that what is tocome will tell us something about the nature of photography. 15

Immediately after having declared his decision not to reply to thissecond letterthis double of the firstNadar offers a twilight scenethat will serve as the setting for the rest of the section. In this scene wecan begin to read another series of doubling, photographic effects.Nadar writes,

Can you imagine anything more satisfying than those momentsof rest before the evening meal, after a long days work? Drivenfrom bed before dawn by the preoccupations of work the man


10/23

can, without counting, struggling against a fatigue that becomesmore oppressive as the day goes on . . . 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-exhaustedmembers and brain. It is this sweet hour par excellence when, . . .rendered to himself at last, he stretches himself with delight inthe chair of his choice, recapitulating the fruit of his days 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 perfectthat day, he will come to us for some good, intimate, comforting banter, . . . he, one of those whom we love more than anybodyelse and who loves usone of those whom our thought alwaysfollows, since their thought is always with us. . . . Exactly thatafternoon, one of the most beloved and best fell upon me, thehighest soul with the most alert and clearest spirit, one of themost brilliant foils cited in Parisian conversation, my excellentHrald de Pagesand what a nice and intimate chat we werehaving, leaving fatigue and all the rest far behinduntil a visitoris announced to us. (ML, 1213; Q , 2324)

This remarkable scene takes place at sundown, at the liminalmoment between day and night, light and darkness, and thereforewithin a photographic temporality and topos. Moreover, in this tran-sitional moment, and in the context of several other threshold figures,especially the several doors Nadar mentions, the shift in pronounsfrom you to he to I to we suggests a self that, like Mauclerc, is alwaysin transit, always passing from one self to another, never simply self-identical to itself. 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 itselfperhaps evenacross other selvesNadar makes impossible a determination of whether the allegorically named Hrald de Pages (the one whoannounces writing to come) actually arrives in person or is a doubleof Nadar who simply enters through the always open back door ofhis unconscious. Whether Hrald de Pages is a visitor who fallsupon Nadar at this twilight hour or an internal double, Nadar pre-sents a self whose identity is essentially linked to and dissolved inrelation to this other. Divided from itselfbecause it is inhabited byan other, because, bearing this trace of the other, this self is no longer

simply itselfthe multiplicity of this self will be confirmed later in thestory and in relation to what happens when one enters a photographicspace Moreover that we already have entered this photographic space


11/23

encounter with the announced visitor.The visitor is a twenty-year-old man. He claims 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 connectionsthey already share: the young mans mother used to work for Nadarsmother, and they also share a friend, Lopold Lchanch, whorecently died. Insofar as mothers are always another name for photog-raphymothers and photography are both means of reproductionand mourning is the photographic experience par excellence, Nadar

and the young mans relation is mediated, even before they meet, bythe photographic. That the young man was born in the year Nadarreceived Gazebons letter requesting that Nadar take the caf ownersself-portrait from afar is fitting because, as Nadar soon will reveal, theyoung 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 thesciences and in several new technological advances, includingthe velocipede, electronic chronometers, the telephone, and, morerecently, 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 Aragowould not accept the word impossibility), if, then, a model,any subject whatsoever, were in this room where we find our-selves right now, for example, and on the other side, yourcamera man with his lens were in his studio, either on this floor,or on any other floor above or below us, that is, absolutely sepa-rated, isolated from this model of which he is unaware, whichhe cannot see, which he has not even seenand which he has no

need to seewould you admit that, if a photograph could betaken here, in front of you, under these strict conditions of seg-regation, the operation thus executed over such a short distancewould have some chance of being reproduced over greaterdistances? (ML, 16; Q , 3031)

Although Nadar immediately responds to the young man by stiffen-ingI dared not move a muscle, he says, becoming in this way akind of photographic effectPages springs up and exclaims, Do youclaim to be able to take photographs across any distance and beyondyour sight? To which the young man replies, I do not claim to be ableto do so, sir; I already have done it. . . . I havent invented anything;I have only found something that was always there (ML, 1617; Q ,


12/23

At two oclock last Sunday afternoon, in the town hall inMontmartre, a most curious experiment took place. A youngman, . . . having obtained the necessary authorizations, demon-strated for the first time publicly his method of electricalphotography, with which ingenious process he is able to photo-graph persons or things beyond his field of vision. The inventorasserted that, from Montmartre, he could photograph the townof Deuil. . . . His Honor the Mayor and several Council memberswere on hand, as well as two or three residents of Deuil, who had

been called upon to indicate the places to be photographed.Several exposures were made in rapid succession and the fin-ished pictures were produced at once. The sites representedwere immediately recognized by the party from Deuil; houses,trees, and people standing out with remarkable clarity. (ML,17; Q , 3435)

The allegory of photography that Nadar wishes to stage here increas-ingly becomes vertiginously self-reflexive: beyond the claim that theyoung man can photograph what he cannot seethat photographycan make the invisible visiblewhat is remarkable here is that the

young man photographs a town called Deuil, which means mourn-ing. In taking a photograph of mourning, the photographer not onlytakes a photograph of an experience at the heart of photographymourning may even be another name for photographybut he alsotakes a photograph of photography itself.

In reaction to this photograph, both Nadar and Pages are speechlessand stunned, again frozen as if in a kind of photograph, as if thisphotographic revelation itself transforms them into photographs. Thistransformation is reinforced in the following passage in which Nadarmakes clear that, when one enters a photographic space (and, at this

point in the story, there is no other kind of space), one always advancesas an other; indeed, as multiple others:

Yes, of course, I gave in. I would have relented long before if . . .if I had not been imperatively arrested by a singular hallucina-tion. Suddenly, as often occurs with optical illusions and certaincases of double vision, the noble features of Hralds face seemedto merge with those of the honest young worker, becoming akind of diabolical mask which slowly took on the form of a faceI had never seen before but that I recognized immediately:Mauclerc, Machiavellian Mauclerc, in transit in our city; theelectric image mockingly reared its head at me from the countryof Henry IV. . . . And I seemed to become Gazebon, yes, Gazebon


13/23

electric process by M. Nadar in Paris; in the meantime, to passthe time, I raised a toast to the best Society, including Englishgentlemen and their ladies. (ML, 18; Q , 3738)

That every self here becomes someone else, and even more than oneother, suggests the continual distortions and displacements fromwhich the photographic subject emerges, but always as an other. Inexperiencing the others alterity, for example, Nadar experiences thealteration that, in him, infinitely displaces and delimits his singu-larity. This movement of disfigurationlinked to the chiasmic plu-rality of the passages interwoven figuresmakes impossible adetermination of who speaks the rest of the story. Where everyone can

become someone elsefor example, in the aleatory, ghostly space of photographyno one is ever simply himself. Because figures alwaysare haunted by other figuresalways are bearing the traces of theotherthey are always themselves and not themselves at the sametime. What gets signaled here is not only the structure of photographyin general, a structure that names the loss of identity that attends theentry into photographic space, but also a mode of writing that per-forms at the level of its sentences and words what it wants us to under-

stand. This becomes clearer when, after the young man leaves, Nadaris left to appreciate his performance: he suggests the young man wasfollowing a script that would permit him to trick Nadar and his some-times mouthpiece, Hrald. A theater, he reminds the reader, is alwaysalso a place of memory and anticipation, where what has been isrehearsed and repeated as what is to come. The story ends with areminder of the citational character of the young man and, by impli-cation, of all of us. We live, Nadar seems to suggest, within quotationmarks, in relation to both mourning and photography. That Nadarassociates photography with death and mourning helps account for

why the memoirs are littered with corpsesfrom the body of Lchanchthat serves a mediating function between Nadar and the young inven-tor of long-range photography to the corpse of the pharmacist lover inthe section Homicidal Photography to the corpse whose body liesin the funeral home scene that opens the vignette entitled TheProfessional Secret to the millions of corpses that populate theParisian Catacombs.

IV.When Baudelaire refers in Spleen II to A pyramid, an immense

vault, / which contains more bodies than the common pit. / . . . acemetery abhorred by the moon, he is referring to what, in a passagecited by Benjamin in his Arcades Project Franois Porch calls the


14/23

the sea of time with all their dead, like ships that have sunk with alltheir crew aboard (AP , 99).16These ossuaries point to another city inthe midst of Paris, a city whose inhabitants far outnumber the living beings of the metropolis above: the underground catacombs.17 Thecreation of the Municipal Ossuary beneath the city correspondsalmost exactly to the timing of the Revolution: ordered in 1784 by theConseil dtat and opened the following year, the catacombs weremeant to relieve the stress on the Cemetery of the Innocents and, evenmore successfully than the Revolution, created a kind of equality thatcould not be found above ground. As Nadar writes in his account of his photographic descent into the Parisian underground,

In this confused equality that is death, the Merovingian kingsmaintain an eternal silence side by side with the victims of themassacre of September 92. Valois, Bourbons, Orlans, and Stuartshaphazardly accomplish their decomposition, lost among malin-gerers . . . and the two thousand of the Religion put to death onSaint-Bartholomews Day. (Q , 129)

Moreover, he adds, celebrated figures from Jean-Paul Marat toMaximilien Robespierre, from Louis de Saint-Just to Georges-JacquesDanton and the Comte de Mirabeau, all succumbed to the anonymityof the catacombs. By the late nineteenth century, the catacombs con-

i d h i f l l illi P i i I hi i

Nadar (Gaspard-FlixTournachon). Catacombs,Paris, Crypt Number 8 , 1861.Albumen print. Bibliothquenationale de France.


15/23

(Q , 137). Like photography, Parisas a citythat exists both above and below groundnames the intersection of life and death.

Nadar took his camera underground intothe catacombs and sewers in 1861. Much of his account of this work details the difficul-ties and challenges he encountered whileexperimenting with electric light. Amongother things, Nadars underground work

literalizes the relation between photographyand death that he already had signaled in theearlier vignettes and that he understands to

belong to photographys signature. Whetherthe bones are put haphazardly on top of oneanother or are neatly organized, the catacombs

are signs of mortality. But, as Christopher Prendergast notes, Nadarslighting sometimes gives a bizarrely polished look to some ofthe skulls, transporting the viewer back into the world of the grand magasin , as if the skulls were so many shining spectral commoditiesplaced on display. 18

This is not the only reminder of the aboveground city in Nadarsunderground, however. The skeletal remains also recall the maskedfaces in the opera or theater. These theatrical resonances are rein-forced by Nadars use of mannequins to represent workers in his pho-tographs. 19 As Nadar explains in a passage that Benjamin cites in hisArcades Project :

With each new camera setup, we had to test our exposure timeempirically; certain of the plates were found to require up toeighteen minutes.Remember, we were still, at that time, using

collodion emulsion on glass negatives. . . . I had judged it advis-able to animate some of these scenes by the use of a humanfigureless from considerations of picturesqueness than inorder to give a sense of scale, a precaution too often neglected byexplorers in this medium and with sometimes disconcertingconsequences. 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 diffi-culty by means of mannequins, which I dressed in workmansclothes and positioned in the scene with as little awkwardness

as possible; this business did nothing to complicate our task.(AP , 673674) 20


16/23

order the remains of the dead, they, along withthe images in which they appear, evoke the tra-dition of vanitas , something Nadar himself sug-gests in his memoirs ( Q , 106). In this world inwhich the boundaries between life and death,or persons and things, have begun to blur, themannequins 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 are unable to beerased, either in life or in death. This is whyNadar emphasizes the palimpsest-like relation

between the underground network of tunnelsand the aboveground network of streets. NadarsParis is always double, is always more than one, which is why, like themannequins that serve as doubles for the workers, it is another namefor repetition and citation, and perhaps for photography itself.

VI.In his 1864 book, terre et en lair: Mmoires du Gant parts of which are incorporated into his later memoirsNadar explains thathis interest in aerial photography grew out of his interest in mappingthe city from a birds-eye view. When Nadar looked to the skies, how-ever, as when he looked to the sewers and catacombs, he encounteredmore than anything else his finitude, even as he continued to wish hecould exceed it. As he says, describing the sensation of being in the airabove Paris,

There only complete detachment, real solitude . . . . [In] the limit-

less immensity of these hospitable and benevolent spaces whereno human force, no power of evil can reach you, you feel yourself living for the first time . . . and the proud feeling of your libertyinvades you . . . in this supreme isolation, in this superhumanspasm . . . the body forgets itself; it exists no longer. 21

But amid the clouds, when he looked down at his beloved city,instead of simply feeling that he was living for the first time, heregistered and experienced another kind of death. The photographsshow what he saw: Paris as it existed in the late 1850s; that is, aParis in transformation because of Georges Haussmanns efforts torenovate and rebuild the city. Taking off from the Champ de Mars,Nadars balloon flight enabled him to view the developments in the

Opposite: Nadar (Gaspard-Flix Tournachon).Catacombs, Paris , April 1862.Albumen silver print fromglass negative. GilmanCollection, The MetropolitanMuseum of Art, New York. The Metropolitan Museum ofArt. Source: Art Resource, NY.

Above: Nadar (Gaspard-FlixTournachon). Catacombs,Paris, Mannequin Number 10 ,1861. Albumen print.Bibliothque nationale deFrance.


17/23

roads that were altering the citys identity, aswell as buildings and landmarks such as theParc Monceau, Montmartre in the distance,and the Arc de Triomphe, all of which werenow resituatedand therefore redefinedinthe context of Pariss transformation. Anotherimage shows the arch at the center of the Placede ltoile, which was one of Haussmanns sig-nature accomplishments (and, because stars belong to the history of photography, confirmsPariss photographic character). As ShelleyRice suggests,

in the clean sweep of their diagonals, intheir geometrical organization, in theirfocus on crossroads and places of exchange, the photographs of Paris itself are indeed the doubles of the pho-

tographs of the underground. . . . All of Nadars documentaryimages of Paris, whether taken above or below the ground, are

about dynamism, circulation, change, and, as a result, about anew, thoroughly modern kind of death.22

But what is this death? This is the question that all photographs askus to consider, and it can be registered everywhere in Nadars photo-graphic trajectory and on each page of his memoirs. Indeed, hisencounter with death is legible in the persistence, for more than fourdecades, with which he remained open to the photographic registra-tion of ruins and death (including those ruins that are the mortal bod-ies that so often sat before his camera, which is why his studio alsocan be understood as a mortuary chamber, something he himself sug-gests in his memoirs). But death also is legible in the disappearance ofthe places and people he photographed during this time. The worldhe photographedincluding a Paris that belongs to the pastthisParis no longer exists and was already, even as he was photographingit, in the process of altering and disappearing. As Baudelaire wouldwrite in The Swan, registering the transformations that Parisians livingin the age of Haussmann witnessed every day, Old Paris is gone(no human heart changes half so fast as a citys face). Paris changes,he adds, But in sadness like mine / nothing stirsnew buildings, old /neighborhoods turn to allegory, / and memories weigh more thanstone. 23 Suggesting that Haussmann was destroying more than simplyobjects and space, Baudelaire also indicates he was erasing the neigh-b

Above: Nadar (Gaspard-FlixTournachon). First Result of Aerostatic Photography , 1868.Bibliothque nationale deFrance.

Opposite: Nadar (Gaspard-Flix Tournachon). Aerial View of Paris (Arc de Triomphe) ,1868. Albumen print. MusedOrsay, Paris. Reproductionphoto: Herv Lewandowski.Runion des MusesNationaux/Art Resource, NY.


18/23

unmoored memories to wander aimlessly through the new metropolis.This is one of the reasons photographyin its capacity to capturemoments and places that are in the process of vanishingbecamesuch an important medium during this period. In Benjamins words,when one knows that something will soon be removed from onesgaze, that thing becomes an image ( W , 115). This also is why Nadarsaerial photographs (and not only these) recall the traces and speci-ficity of a particular culture and history, even as they inevitably markthe disappearance, loss, and ruin of this same culture and history. Hisimages therefore bear an act of mourning that nevertheless remains inlove with a city that could be said to have died several times, even if itis still living, even if, in its living, it remains haunted by its past andits deaths. Precisely this survival, precisely this living on, reminds usthat things pass, that they change and alter, and this is why, through-out his literary and photographic career, Nadar always remained mostinterested in, and most faithful to, this process of change and trans-formation. The very law that motivates and marks his writings and hisphotographs is this law of change and transformation.

In a certain sense, Nadar the photographer, because of his fidelityto the finitude and evanescence of things, already signals and bearsthe mourning of Paristhis city that, as he always suggested, belongsto death. This is why even the mourning of Paris, the mourning of aParis that has disappeared and that shows the body of its ruinsbutalso the mourning of the Paris that he knows, even as he photographsit, will soon vanish is itself destined to pass away but always inanother act of mourning. Benjamin reinforces Nadars sense of Parissfinitude when, in Convolute C of his Arcades Project a sectiondevoted to Ancient Paris, Catacombs, Demolitions, [and the] Declineof Parishe cites Gustave Geffroys comments on Charles Meryons


19/23

[h]is work as an engraver representsone of the profoundest poems everwritten about a city, and what istruly original in all these strikingpictures is that they seem to be theimage, despite being drawn directlyfrom life, of things that are finished,that are dead or about to die. ( AP , 96)

But, as Nadar also knew, death is not sim-ply a matter of things disappearing evenin relation to the photographic act thatwould seek to preserve them, becauseanother form of mourning is possible, onein which photographs capture scenes that,although visible today, will disappeartomorrow. Nadar knows that everything

passes. The figures and people in his photographs, the sites, theobjects, all these are destined to death. This is why, within the worldof Nadars photographs, within his photographopolis, every photo-

graph is associated with death and why the sections of his memoirs Ihave touched on here are everywhere marked by a sense of death.Whatever the represented thing may beand even when death is notshown even indirectlythe thing represented is still touched by death,

by the fact of its passing. Even the sunfrom which all photographstake their point of departurewill one day pass, will one day nolonger cast its light on the earth. Because photography belongs to thedying 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, andwithin Nadars world Paris and photography constitute themselves as

allegories of each other. Nadar thinks about this Paris-Photographevery day. But what happens within his imagination in relation toParis? What haunts him? What encourages him to focus, like a kind of camera, on the relations among photography, death, and the day andnight that touched each of his subjects?

Nadars photographs are the indices of his particular vision, thetraces of a declaration of love. If we listen to the silence of hisphotographs, we perhaps can hear him say, across this silence, and tothe Paris and people he loved, and loved to photograph, even as theywere 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 asingle desire: to alter time I want nothing else than to arrest time to

Above: Nadar (Gaspard-FlixTournachon). Sarah Bernhardt , 1864. Salted paperprint. Muse dOrsay, Paris.Runion des MusesNationaux/Art Resource, NY.

Opposite: Nadar (Gaspard-Flix Tournachon). Victor Hugo on His Deathbed , May23, 1885. Muse dOrsay,Paris. Reproduction photo:Herv Lewandowski. Runiondes Muses Nationaux/ArtResource, NY.


20/23

else than to archive and preserve, within a series of photographs, notonly the speed of light but also the night and oblivion without which wecould never see, and, yes, the death and mourning without whichneither I nor you can be said to live. I want to touch and preserve thispassing which belongs to both life and death, mine and yours, andwhich offers me a series of shifting reflections, as if in water, in whichI can see myself, but as the one who is no longer just myself, as the onewho is no longer here.


21/23

Notes1. Siegfried Kracauer, Photography (1927), in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays ,

trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 59.2. Walter Benjamin, Paralipomena to On the Concept of History, trans. Edmund

Jephcott and Howard Eiland, in 19381940 , vol. 4 of Selected Writings , ed. HowardEiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of HarvardUniversity Press, 2003), 405. For the original German, see Gesammelte Schriften , 7vols., ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhuser (Frankfurt: SuhrkampVerlag, 1972), 1:1238. In the passage, Benjamin quotes Andr Monglond, Le prro- mantisme franais (1930; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 2000), xii; and Hugo vonHofmannsthal, Der Tor und der Tod (1894), in Gesammelte Werke , ed. Herbert Steiner(Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1952), 3:220.

3. David Ferris, The Shortness of History, or Photography in Nuce : BenjaminsAttenuation of the Negative, in Walter Benjamin and History , ed. Andrew Benjamin(New York: Continuum, 2006), 20.

4. Walter Benjamin, Convolute N, in The Arcades Project , trans. Howard Eilandand Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard UniversityPress, 1999), 456. Subsequent references to this text, abbreviated AP and with appro-priate page number(s), are given parenthetically in the article.

5. Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire ,trans. Howard Eiland et al., ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The BelknapPress of Harvard University Press, 2006), 27. Subsequent references to this text,abbreviated W and with appropriate page number(s), are given parenthetically in thearticle.

6. Rosalind Krauss, Tracing Nadar, October 5 (Summer 1978): 29.7. The one exception is Jrme Thlot, who in the third chapter of his book Les

inventions littraires de la photographie argues for the theoretical and performativecharacter of Nadars writings. See Jrme Thlot , Photographie homicide , par Nadar,in Les inventions littraires de la photographie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,2003), 5369.

8. Flix Nadar, La premire preuve de photographie arostatique, in Quand jtais photographe (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 104. While the three opening vignettes have been translated and published under the title My Life as a Photographer, the French

title, Quand jtais photographe , is better translated as When I Was a Photographer .Since we know that Nadar took photographs throughout the entirety of his life, thepast 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 deador rather, at thethreshold of life and death, dead but still writingNadar writes his memoirs, but asa 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, figureshis death by anticipating it. The title he gives his memoirs, in other words, is meant tofurther convey what he wants to say about photographys essential relation to death.

9. See Walter Benjamin, Excavation and Memory, trans. Rodney Livingstone, in19271934 , vol. 2 of Selected Writings , ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, andGary Smith (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999),576; and Walter Benjamin, Berlin Chronicle , trans. Edmund Jephcott, in 19271934 ,ed. Jennings, Eiland, and Smith, 611.


22/23

appropriate page number(s), are given parenthetically in the article. Translations have been modified when necessary. The French original reads, Quand le bruit se rpan-dit que deux inventeurs venaient de russir fixer sur des plaques argentes touteimage prsente devant elles, ce fut une universelle stupfaction dont nous ne saurionsnous faire aujourdhui lide, accoutums que nous sommes depuis nombre dannes la photographie et blass par sa vulgarisation. See Nadar,Quand jtais photo-

graphe , 9. Subsequent references to the full French edition of the memoirs, abbrevi-ated Q and with appropriate page number(s), are given parenthetically in the article.

11. See Benjamin,Berlin Chronicle , 613. There Benjamin writes of images that,according to the teachings of Epicurus, constantly detach themselves from things anddetermine our perception of them.

12. See Lucretius,De Rerum Natura : A Poetic Translation , trans. David R. Slavitt(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 140141.

13. I am indebted here to Eric Downings reading of the role and place of Lucretiuss discussion of images within Benjamins photographic reflections. See EricDowning, Lucretius at the Camera: Ancient Atomism and Early PhotographicTheory in Walter BenjaminsBerliner Chronik , The Germanic Review 81, no. 1(Winter 2006): 2136. On the relation of Democrituss theory of the eidola to photog-raphy, see Branka Arsic, The Home of Shame, in Cities without Citizens , ed. EduardoCadava and Aaron Levy (Philadelphia: Slought Books and the Rosenbach Museumand Library, 2003), 36.

14. Flix Tournachon-Nadar,Expos de motifs pour la revendication de la pro- prit exclusive du pseudonyme Nadar, et supplment au mmoire (Paris: Dondey-Dupre, 1857), 1416. On the centrality of the portrait in general for Nadar, seeStphanie de Saint Marc,Nadar (Paris: ditions Gallimard, 2010), 140166.

15. On the citational character of photography, see myWords of Light (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), xvii.

16. See Charles Baudelaire,Fleurs du mal , trans. Richard Howard (Boston: DavidR. Godine, 1985), 78. The French original is on p. 252.

17. I am indebted in this discussion of Pariss catacombs to Christopher Prendergast,Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), esp.74101; David L. Pike,Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London,18001945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), esp. 101128; Shelley Rice,

Parisian Views (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997), esp. ch. 5; and Caroline Archer,Paris Underground (New York: Mark Batty Publisher, 2005).

18. Prendergast, 8081.19. On this point, see Prendergast, 81.20. For the original French, see Nadar,Quand jtais photographe , 155156.21. See Rice, 173.22. Rice, 177.23. Baudelaire, 9091, 268269.


23/23

Copyright of Grey Room is the property of MIT Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple

sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print,

download, or email articles for individual use.

Documents

Nadar's Photographopolis - Cadava