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Nadar (self-portrait).

Félix Nadar was the pseudonym of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (6 April 1820 – 21 March 1910), a French photographer, caricaturist, journalist, novelist and balloonist. Some photographs by Nadar are marked "P. Nadar" for "Photographie Nadar" (see image below).

[edit] Life

"Nadar élevant la Photographie à la hauteur de l'Art" (Nadar elevating Photography to Art). Lithograph by Honore Daumier, appearing in Le Boulevard, May 25, 1863.

Nadar was born in April 1820 in Paris (though some sources state Lyon). He was a caricaturist for Le Charivari in 1848. In 1849 he created the Revue comique and the Petit journal pour rire. He took his first photographs in 1853 and in 1858 became the first person to take aerial photographs. He also pioneered the use of artificial lighting in photography, working in the catacombs of Paris.

Around 1863, Nadar built a huge (6000 m³) balloon named Le Géant ("The Giant"), thereby inspiring Jules Verne's Five Weeks in a Balloon. The "Géant" project was unsuccessful and convinced him that the future belonged to heavier-than-air machines. Afterwards "The Society for the Encouragement of Aerial Locomotion by Means of Heavier than Air Machines" was established, with Nadar as president and Verne as secretary. Nadar was also the inspiration for the character of Michael Ardan in Verne's From the Earth to the Moon.

On his visit to Brussels with the Géant, on 26 September 1864, Nadar erected mobile barriers to keep the crowd at a safe distance. Up to this day, crowd control barriers are known in Belgium as Nadar barriers.^[1]

In April 1874, he lent his photo studio to a group of painters, thus making the first exhibition of the Impressionists possible. He photographed Victor Hugo on his death-bed in 1885. He is credited with having published (in 1886) the first photo-interview (of famous chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, then a centenarian), and also took erotic photographs.

From 1895 until his return to Paris in 1909, the Nadar photo studio was in Marseilles (France).

On his passing in 1910, Nadar was buried in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

[edit] Gallery

Charles Baudelaire	Sarah Bernhardt	Georges Boulanger	Georges Clemenceau
Camille Corot	Gustave Courbet	Charles-François Daubigny	Eugène Delacroix
Jules Favre in 1865	Léon Gambetta in 1870	Gustave Doré (1859)	Alexandre Dumas, père
Ilja Iljitsch Metschnikow	Jean-François Millet	Peter Kropotkin	Franz Liszt
Gérard de Nerval	Nasser al-Din Shah Qajar, king of Persia 1848-1896	Henri Rochefort	George Sand (1864)
Ernest H. Shackleton	Adolphe Thiers	Jules Verne	Marquis de Galliffet, the fusilleur de la Commune
Théophile Gautier	Le Bris and his flying machine, Albatros II	Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) - Self-portrait	Nadar's son, photographed by Nadar with members of the Second Japanese Embassy to Europe in 1863.
The former painter Charles Crodel with a sketch-book, photograph by Nadar, Marseille, 21 rue de Noailles, 1905