NADAR (France, 1820-1910),
CAMERON (U.K., 1815-1879)
The internal milieu and transcendent fulguration
An uninterrupted succession of technical invention soon allowed reaching,
in the multipliable negative-positive process – or calotype-talbotype
– a definition of the image rivalling with that of the daguerreotype with
its unique copies.
This generated great perplexity with the English photographers.
Eastlake, whose wife we have just met through her portrait by Hill and Adamson,
presided (in 1853) over a stormy session in his recently founded academy, during
which painters-photographers split into two camps. The first camp, so-called
Pre-Raphaelites, accepted – in the name of painting - the new detailed
image. They thought that they were witnessing an ancestral desire for
objectivity. The latter, so-called Moderns feared the fine definition, also in
the name of painting, from which they particularly held onto the freedom and peculiarity
of conceptions. Among the latter, William J. Newton had recommended putting ‘the
whole subject a little out of focus’ to uphold the subjectivity that was
threatened – in his opinion - by the exactitude of the rendering. This
was the beginning of the forthcoming pictorialism, of which Peter Henry Emerson
created the theory in 1889.
1. The internal milieu: Nadar
In France, Nadar – whose photographic fervour begins in 1853 - extracted
new detail from the negative-positive suite from all other consequences. He
used it to follow the physiology of bodies in every state.
Van Eyck’s Canon Van der Paelen presents a skin accident as a status statement,
old age and a venerable wisdom, whereas other painters saw it as a picturesque
mark. For Nadar, it was the manifestation of the internal work of an organ or
of energies, like in the case of his West Indian girl, dated 1854-59, whose
breasts are rounded to the buds of their areolas (PN*, 87). At other times, it
is a manifestation of its wearing out, like in the example of Isidore Taylor (the
MOMA’s copy – dated circa 1865 (**LP, 25) -is reproduced here). No
anecdote. Skin accidents are the manifestation of latent, underground forces
exempt of any external influence. Even when Nadar
photographs a city, his vision grasps from below, from within. Once he fully
masters artificial lighting, he photographs the Parisian catacombs and sewers
in 1860 (Eugène Sue had completed the Mystères de Paris in 1844). When he will turn to
aerial photography, it will be to grasp, in one single view, large panels of
the earth in its skin.
Simultaneously, a movement is seized. Obviously not an exterior, recent
movement, since, at the outbreak of the American civil war in 1861, American
photographers had to abandon the idea of photographing combats and make do with
their prodromes and sequels, as the exposure time was measured in seconds. However,
Nadar’s exposure time grasps organisms doted with an internal and potential
movement exalted by immobility because it targets muted energies. Henceforth, the
genius that romanticism had supposed as coming down from the heavens, now became
the result of a particularly intense or particular biological thrust, a
principal movement manifested by external and successive gestures. Of course,
this is what the Latin ingenium had aimed at, an inbred lot (PP, 18, 23).
Nadar’s photographs of the times are not so much of women and children, deemed
too smooth and available, but rather of men with their marked faces.
An appropriate centring, one that showed the latent, muted movement of
the physiology needed to be elected. The main thing was not to let oneself be
dispersed: faced to a standing or seated body, Nadar – who usually takes
several frames per session – captures what occurs between the knees and
the skull, sometimes between the hips and the skull, as the latter finds space
to shine in an often-vast, top hollow. For the rest, since the thrusts are
latent, the body must invent itself with the minimum of accessories. Sometimes,
this means that the photographer has to greatly intervene in the clothing
– not specifically in the choice of attire that is part of the inventing
body, but to set alive a pleat here, disguise another one there – to
obtain such pleating that the twists and turns of the fabric should clad
closely and continue internal virtualities (PP, 23). Sometimes, they continue
the shape of a seat, a table, a draping (PP, 2, 4, 44, particularly 9) and it
is not negligible that the twist of a [furniture] leg should move up towards
the left (PP, 11) or the right (PP, 13). Of course, there was a trance before
the pose. It begins with the verbal or written command and ends in the studio,
amongst a maelstrom of preposterous exclamations, documented questions,
demonstrative gestures. Physiology for physiology, the shooting is a clinch
(PP, 62). The excellent composition of the illustrations of Photo Poche’s Nadar shows this very well, particularly
as it is shorn of ornaments.
Nothing best explains the appearance of Nadar’s ‘physiologies’ than
their contrast with anterior daguerreotypes. Those, as they were originally in
negative, worked as relics in the full sense, since the photons that touched
the portrayed were the same than those that had touched the plate that we, in
turn, touch. Such sacramental presence produced a delimitation and a congealing
that was appropriate to the voluntarism of puritan American. The documents
compiled by Beaumont Newhall in The Daguerreotype in America (Dover, 1961) show the portrayed as
set in his interior or exterior environment. However, it is the possibility of
going this extreme of the body’s signature, and showing the autonomous
latencies of organisms through the detail of the collidon, then the gelatinous
silver bromide, that became Nadar’s photographic subject in a historical moment
attentive to latent forces.
In 1855, Claude Bernard established physiology while meditating over his
Introduction à l’étude de la medicine expérimentale (1865). The thesis of the latter is
precisely that every organism is an ‘internal milieu’ that is not subject to
actions others than of himself on himself, just like in a poisoning, it is
himself that poisons himself through a poison. The notion of energy –
particularly useful energy – is proclaimed just after 1850 with the two
principles of Clausius-Carnot Thermodynamic. The idea of competing energies
animates everything, from the industry and monetary speculation to geology and
biology and the shaping of species: Origin of Species is - a suffocating
swarming of mineral and physiological forces - is published in 1862. Maxime Du
Camp, who went looking for the preparatory photographs with Flaubert, was close
to Nadar. Strangely enough, the latter brings a boil to his fermenting bodies
while the essence of chemistry works with ferments. Pasteur is determined
– against the opinion of Berzelius (who introduces ‘catalysis’ in 1837)
– to have the process of fermentation depend off a ‘vital’ force of the ‘live’
ferment.
Very soon – just like the Jules Verne of the Journey to the
Centre of the Earth,
dated 1864 -, several photographers moved from the physiology of live bodies to
that of the whole earth as an organism in its monstrous thrusts at Yosemite
Valley and Yellowstone. O’Sullivan’s famous photograph where gas vapours and earth’s
crust escape through the crack of Streamboat Springs is dated 1867 (FS, p. 32).
However, Nadar’s role as the privileged actor of such a strong
historical moment that it should suffice to his glory, does not explain the
deflagrating character of his Portrait of Isidore Taylor (**LP, 25). Further to the internal
physiological movement, we must note the frankly pictorial pose - and more
precisely the bourgeois pictorial pose, that of Ingres’ Portrait de Monsieur
Bertin, dated 1832
– in the declared suite of the left hand leaning on the thigh, the right
arm on the book, the head on the chest, and the whole figure on the seat. The
organic and cultural circuit is almost architecturally complete: the citadel of
sensory organs in the face, the depressed machinery of the lungs, the bloated
stomach pulling apart the tails of the frock coat that shines on a gaping
openness of shadow, the detailed table, the heavy book and the text that we
suppose important. The indexation of the essential focus ends with the
directional lighting. Was such composing pictoriality an episodic concession to
the fact that Taylor, who wrote for the theatre and several travel books before
becoming a senator – was in relation with Ingres, whom he had asked for
some illustrations? Partly. But we must see that this type of effect is subjacent
everywhere in Nadar’s work. For instance, in one of his portraits of
Baudelaire, as the latter was finishing the Fleurs du Mal in around 1855 (FS, 77), we note that the bias lengthened torso,
the right arm and the top of the armchair make up a triangle that is both
steady and floating, whose potential movement is in consonance with the poet’s
language subject, as could be the case for a great portraitist painter.
Let us get to the heart. This conjunction of pictoriality in the
composition and of photographicity in the detailed physiological inscription
provokes a logic-semiotic torsion for Nadar that we should stress, as it will
become a constant motive of photography.
Indeed, a painting is elaborated by a hand that answers to a brain with
each trait, as it refers to analogical referential signs (images) and sometimes in digital
referential signs
(texts or digits) which are joined by indexes (lat. indices), pointings, vanishing lines, and
diverse accents. Simultaneously, the painter is able to create highly coherent perceptive-motor
field effects. There are very few – if any – indices (lat. indicia) when
traces of impatience or returns in the stroke appear. In a nutshell, a painting
designates, demonstrates, refers to when it is figurative, but also when it is
non-figurative. In the later case, its referent is topology, cybernetic,
logic-semiotic (‘abstract’ or ‘concrete’), making up the painter’s pictorial
subject.
At the opposite, a photographer can only capture indices (lat.indicia), the
imprints of photons reverberated by an external event. And simultaneously, its
perceptive-motor shot effects can only be weak and not very coherent. Nadar can
titillate Isidore Taylor’s cuffs to set off their white sparkle hence creating
a certain gravitating perception between them, the collar and the nose. He can
even – in the MOMA’s print reproduced here (**LP, 25) keep the
combination of arabesques and chiaroscuro used by Ingres – and that the
subject must have liked – through the extraordinary precision of the Woodburytype
(an ink print from a copper engraving preserving all its values): the pleats of
the clothes and the traits of the face play their own game, escaping, drifting.
A photo is made up of indicia, the photonic imprints. It proposes, exposes,
betrays, shows, surrenders. It only refers-to by a few rare and floating
indexes, such as directional lighting, frame orientations, vanishing lines or
still, the attitude suggested to the motive. There are stronger – and
more innovative - perceptive-motor shot effects in just one of the hands of the
Louvre’s Monsieur Bertin than in Isidore Taylor as a whole.
Hence, when Nadar boosts picturiality by the most Ingresque composition
and photographicity through the physiological detail – which fatally disperses
the perceptive-motor field effects –, he provokes a torsion, a
logic-semiotic curvature, which triggers in return a thwarted perceptive-motor field
effect that springs up and escapes simultaneously. Hence the deflagrating
effect of Isidore Taylor, where the explicit allusion to Ingres forces the distortion, distension,
to the climax. Nadar’s photographic subject is the potentialities of the
psychological latency period but also this constantly stirred up contradiction,
with some peculiar semiotic field effect.
It took many factors for Nadar to be possible. In Jules Verne’s 1865
novel, From the Earth to the Moon, the author – who deemed him with a ‘lion’s
head’ because of his red haired mane - changed the photographer’s name to Ardan
(an anagram of Nadar) and granted him with ‘wonderment, this instinct that
brings some temperaments to be passionate about super-human things’. Nadar
– or Mister Tournachon then Tournadard, then Nadard and Nadar – was
the son of an editor-librarian in Lyon. All his life, he will be passionate about
journalism – particularly theatre chronicles. He starts off by working as
a caricature artist after attending a few medicine courses, hence comforting
the physiological outlook that others share with him around that time (Essay
de physiognomonie by Swiss
Tôppfer dated 1845). The 249 famous figures of the 1854 Nadar Pantheon testify of this viewpoint as do even more some
preparatory drawings like this sketch of Balzac, where the paintbrush boosts up the internal
pressures of daguerreotype he bought from Gavarni (***Nadar, Hubschmid, 893).
However, Nadar touches photography to prepare his drawings, and soon notes that
it serves best his extra-scientific vision. He will only draw to retouch his
proofs with a pencil. He develops artificial lighting, takes the first aerial
photographs, and, in 1863, commissions the building of The Giant, a 40-metre high balloon. When the
latter takes off for the second time in the presence of Napoleon III (that the
good socialist he is holds in contempt), the outcome is a catastrophe. His legs
are broken, while his wife, the entrepreneurial Ernestine, has her thorax
smashed in. He nonetheless continues to exploit the Giant until 1867 and comes back to work
as aeronaut during the Paris siege. Simultaneously, he praises the virtues of ‘the
heavier than air’ with the support of Victor Hugo and our Isodore Taylor, and
of course, of from the Earth to the Moon Jules Verne. He exults when Blériot crosses the
English Channel in 1909! This hormonal [man] only feels at ease in the hubbub
of artist and scientists, who, in the era of Bohemia and Dandyism were powerful
animals made to enter straight into his photographic subject. In his studio, he
will house the two first impressionist salons of 1874 and 1887.
Apart from that, Jules Verne was right: « wonderment »
excludes « acquisivity » and therefore engenders some disorder. No
sure datation. From 1870, who did what? Himself? His son Paul? His wife Ernestine?
And when it was him, was he alert, hunting, or fulfilled? Lions quickly move
their paws and digest slowly. Photography? It is « this prodigious art
that, with the applied electricity and chloroform, makes our nineteenth century
the greatest of all centuries »; but an 1892 letter to his son Paul speaks
of indifference, aversion, and even horror.
These sudden changes of mood are not incomprehensible. Nadar is in love
with physiology. As an organism, Nadar was himself the place of deportments,
new starts and the most violent depressions. A genius with his hands, he is
bored whenever he can do something too easily. But, above all, if he no longer
jumps before or behind his camera obscura, it is because at the end of his
life, in around 1900, there is no-one likely to wake him up by bouncing up
before him apart from Chevreul, the chemist of the stearine candle and the
simultaneous contrast of colours, who is over a hundred years old when Nadar
questions him in 1886. If only luck had made him bump into Rimbaud! Or into
Verlaine before his decline! How could he sign with his lion leap signature ‘Nadar’
on the pale bodies of a young Proust or the 1890 symbolists, such as Mallarmé
and his Méry ‘pink blond with golden hair’ when he had met the physiologies of
Gautier and Baudelaire, whose preparatory drawing of the Nadar Pantheon
captures a glance that no-one had ever imagined (Nadar, Hobschmid, 895)? The
abundance or lack of game is also part of the historicity of a photographic
subject, hence of a photographer.
2.Transcendent fulguration: Margaret Cameron
Since 1863, Margaret Cameron, born in India, educated in France, and
settled in England, has acquired a taste for photography. She also rubs
shoulders with exceptional characters, and counts in her circle of friends
Lewis Carroll, famous photographer logician of the greatest logicians, i.e. little
girls; Carlyle, who exalts heroic men in the German fashion; John Herschel, who
enumerates nebulae and specializes in double stars. However, it could not
escape these sublimed spirits that photos, proceeding from light to form
– and not from form to light as in painting – had a proclivity to
extricate ‘figures’ in the biblical sense, meaning some large vertical,
horizontal, diagonal orientations of space that were more sacred and
transcendent that they were bare, elementarily contrasted, more general.
Margaret Cameron made photonically engendered ‘figures’ in that sense her
photographic subject. At the time and in her circles, the subject had to relate
– apart from biblical themes – to some astronomical symbols such as
these two kissing children entitled, with a veiled reference to John Herschel, The
Double Star (AP,
59). Our Child’s Head, dated 1866 (****AP, 61), which is figural to the extreme, does not
hold a particular psychology, yet, in its archetypal circularity, it delivers
the combat light/shade, that will be interpreted as day/night, good/evil,
life/death, yes/no, present/future, present/past, Christianity/paganism,
according to the faith. Of course, John Herschel and Carlyle’s faces, radiant with light from within,
became in turn figural (AP, 62, 63).
In the strictest sense, the figures establishing themselves from the
dawn of photography will remain ever-present in its history, and we will find
them, secularized, in the work of Duane Michals and Ralph Gibson, near us. On
the other hand, are they not underlying in Nadar’s work? To all that Isodore
Taylor forced us to
say concerning its deflagrating character, should we not add the frank,
elementary, specifically figural cut created by the photonic reception of the
lighting? The arabesque is not unrelated to figurality in this Ingres transfer.
Henri Van Lier
A photographic history of photography
in Les Cahiers de la Photographie, 1992
List of abbreviations of common references:
PN: Photography until Now, Museum of Modem Art.
AP: The Art of Photography, Yale University Press.
FS: On the Art of Fixing a Shadow, Art Institute of Chicago.
LP: Szarkowski, Looking at Photographs, Museum of Modem Art.
PP: Photo Poche,Centre National de la Photographie, Paris.
The acronyms (*), (**), (***) refer to
the first, second, and third illustration of the chapters, respectively. Thus,
the reference (*** AP, 417) must be interpreted as: “This refers to the third
illustration of the chapter, and you will find a better reproduction, or a
different one, with the necessary technical specifications, in The Art of
Photography listed under
number 417”.