ABSTRACT
The portraitist Nadar was well-placed by longevity and a chequered, somewhat picaresque career to survey his century’s shifts and advances towards modernity. Though it was written toward the end of his life, Nadar’s memoir, My Life as a Photographer, was undertaken at a point when its author’s activity in the medium had far from ceased. The memoir on photography was hardly Nadar’s only publication. In the three chapters, then, Nadar circles around what seems for him to be the central fact of photography: that its operation is that of the imprint, the register, the trace. Photography was born in the 1830s by, in Nadar’s words, ‘exploding suddenly into existence, surpassing all possible expectations.’ And into the initial responses to this event are folded the themes of the Spiritualism. For Nadar the question of the intelligible trace remained viable as an esthetic basis for the photography.
