Inventing Nadar

A History of Photographic Firsts

Emily Doucet

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781478038634
  9781478033721
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478062196
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Photography

Félix Nadar took the first aerial photograph in 1858, so the story goes. The evidence, Emily Doucet notes, is mixed. In Inventing Nadar, Doucet analyzes the historical and material production of the nineteenth-century Parisian photographer's famous and numerous photographic firsts. Focusing on these oft-labeled groundbreaking elements of his career, she deconstructs Nadar's legacy as a prime protagonist in the history of photography by interrogating the media techniques used to construct his invention narratives. Doucet highlights this highly mediated process as one that canonized novel applications of photography as discrete techniques with single authors and inventors. Looking to this process of mediation through the institutions and individuals that shaped Nadar's archives, Doucet unpacks assumptions of Nadar as a master of early photography and shows how the medium is enmeshed in larger histories of media, science, and technology. The result is both a new account of Nadar's place in photographic history and a critical study of how stories of innovation take shape.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: “Who Do You Think Is the Greatest Photographer in the World?"
• 1. Collecting the Ideas in the Air: The First Aerial Photograph
• 2. Patent Priorities: The First Photograph by Electric Light
• 3. Sound Reproductions: The First Photographic Interview
• 4. Illuminating Infrastructures: The First Photographs Underwater and Underground
• 5. When I Was a Photographer, or The History of Photography in Photographic Firsts
• Epilogue: The History of Photography, as Told to Me by Nadar
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index