The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera - Hardcover

Begley, Adam

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1101902604 ISBN 13: 9781101902608

Publisher: Crown Publishing Group, Division of Random House Inc, 2017

Synopsis

A dazzling, stylish biography of a fabled Parisian photographer, adventurer, and pioneer.

A recent French biography begins, Who doesn't know Nadar? In France, that's a rhetorical question. Of all of the legendary figures who thrived in mid-19th-century Paris—a cohort that includes Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Gustave Courbet, and Alexandre Dumas—Nadar was perhaps the most innovative, the most restless, the most modern.

The first great portrait photographer, a pioneering balloonist, the first person to take an aerial photograph, and the prime mover behind the first airmail service, Nadar was one of the original celebrity artist-entrepreneurs. A kind of 19th-century Andy Warhol, he knew everyone worth knowing and photographed them all, conferring on posterity psychologically compelling portraits of Manet, Sarah Bernhardt, Delacroix, Daumier and countless others—a priceless panorama of Parisian celebrity.

Born Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, he adopted the pseudonym Nadar as a young bohemian, when he was a budding writer and cartoonist. Later he affixed the name Nadar to the façade of his opulent photographic studio in giant script, the illuminated letters ten feet tall, the whole sign fifty feet long, a garish red beacon on the boulevard. Nadar became known to all of Europe and even across the Atlantic when he launched "The Giant," a gas balloon the size of a twelve-story building, the largest of its time. With his daring exploits aboard his humongous balloon (including a catastrophic crash that made headlines around the world), he gave his friend Jules Verne the model for one of his most dynamic heroes.

The Great Nadar is a brilliant, lavishly illustrated biography of a larger-than-life figure, a visionary whose outsized talent and canny self-promotion put him way ahead of his time.

About this title

About the Author

Adam Begley is the author of Updike. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 2010 and a fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography in 2011; from 1997 to 2009 he was the books editor of The New York Observer. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The London Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement. He lives with his wife in Cambridgeshire, England.

From the Back Cover

A dazzling, stylish biography of a fabled Parisian photographer, adventurer, and pioneer. A recent biography begins, Who doesn’t know Nadar? In France, that’s a rhetorical question. Of all of the legendary figures who emerged from mid-19th-century Paris―a cohort that includes Victor Hugo and Baudelaire, Gustave Courbet, and Alexandre Dumas―Nadar may be the most innovative, the most restless, the most modern. The first great portrait photographer, a pioneering balloonist, the first person to take an aerial photograph and launch an air mail service, Nadar was one of the first celebrity artist-entrepreneurs. A kind of 19th-century Andy Warhol, he knew everyone worth knowing and photographed them all, leaving for posterity psychologically compelling portraits of Manet, Sarah Bernhardt, Delacroix, Daumier, and countless others―a priceless panorama of Parisian celebrity. Born Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, he adopted the pseudonym Nadar as a young bohemian, when he was a budding writer and cartoonist. Later he would install the name Nadar on the façade of his opulent photographic studio in giant script, the illuminated letters ten feet tall, the whole sign fifty feet long. Nadar became known to all of Europe and even across the Atlantic after he launched “The Giant,” a hot-air balloon as tall as a 12-story building, the largest of its time. His ballooning exploits, which include a catastrophic crash that made headlines around the world, inspired his friend Jules Verne create one of his most dynamic heroes. The Great Nadar illuminates a larger-than-life figure, a visionary whose outsized talent and canny self-promotion put him ahead of his time.

Edition details

• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group, Division of Random House Inc
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1101902604
• ISBN 13: 9781101902608
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256