When I was a photographer. Nadar

Nadar (Gaspar Felix Tournashon, 1820-1910) is one of the main photographers of the XIX century, and according to Rolan Bart, the greatest photographer in the world. He began as a journalist and cartoonist, but became famous primarily as a portrait photographer. His photos of Alexander Dumas Sr. and Emil Zola, Eduard Manet and Claude Monet, Georges Sand and Sarah Bernard look implausible modern and very directly. It is thanks to Nadar that we can see living people in them - picturesque and graphic portraits, no matter how good they are, do not give such an effect. In addition, Nadar became the first person who mastered (and patented! - as he himself would not fail to emphasize) aerial photography - he managed to take the first picture from the basket of the balloon.
Nadar was an amazing person who combined the children"s excitement of the discoverer, a subtle artistic taste (if not a flair), the talkativeness and boastfulness of a simple burgher with the insight of a real businessman. And all these features were reflected in the book. At first glance, “when I was a photographer "can be classified as representatives of a specific genre of elegant word -block. The book consists of 12 stories: Nadar either takes pictures of the famous Parisian catacombs, for the first time using artificial lighting, then lists the merits of his photographic predecessors, then rises completely naked on a half -blower balloon, in order to finally be able to make the world"s first frame from the air, then accidentally gives an official posthumous posterity Portrait of the wrong woman - and so on. But in fact, behind all these often quite boastful stories, baroque constructions and hypnotic enumerations of the names lies a thin and sensitive analysis of the outgoing era, its era