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Félix Nadar: the first celebrity photographer (2019)
His studio hosted the first Impressionist exhibition and he took the world’s first aerial photo: Félix Nadar lived an extraordinary life, as Cath Pound discovers.
Instinctively understanding the emerging interest in celebrity – and the role photography could play in it – he created psychologically complex portraits of the leading artists, writers and actors of mid-19th-Century Paris which managed to turn the nascent medium into an artform. Moving to plush new premises on the Boulevard des Capucines in 1860 (which he would lend to a group of painters for the first exhibition of Impressionists, including Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro and Berthe Morisot, in 1874), he revelled in his success. Undeterred by a disastrous first flight which landed ignominiously a mere 25 miles (40km) from Paris, Nadar set out again on 18 October 1863, this time reaching Germany before a too-swift descent resulted in the balloon being dragged along by high winds and narrowly escaping being hit by a train.
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