975
Nadar increasingly relied on studio assistants, who
sometimes worked without him, to create his photo-
graphs. Despite the commissions, Nadar closed his
studio on the fashionable boulevard des Capucines in
- That same year, he established a smaller practice
at 51 rue d’Anjou. Run by his wife, Ernestine, this studio
catered to a more affl uent clientele and prospered. Paul,
who had been trained by his father, acted as the artis-
tic director, while Nadar pursued other interests. Paul
became manager in 1874 and led the Nadar Studio in a
different direction. While Nadar photographed wealthy
clients in order to fund other projects, Paul actively
sought such commissions, even photographing theater
troupes and producing the occasional nude postcard to
make the studio profi table.
Paul changed the celebrated Nadar aesthetic in order
to accommodate this new clientele. Paul and Ernestine
embraced conventional studio photographic props that
Nadar despised, such as artifi cial backdrops, contrived
poses, and elaborate furniture to create a more decorative
style. Although the photographs show more generic ex-
pressions and less personality than in his father’s portraits
of his friends, this fashionable aesthetic catered to the
new style and allowed the studio to fi nancially prosper.
Between 1880 and 1885, Paul ran the Nadar studio.
Because of his aesthetic and production methods, critics
have portrayed Paul as less concerned with craftman-
ship than his father. Paul worked with gelatin instead of
collodion negatives to increase the number of negatives
and did not use salted paper or albumen for printing
as Nadar had done. Therefore, when he reworked his
father’s glass negatives, his prints lacked the delicacy
and degrees of tonality of the originals. In addition, he
often altered Nadar’s negatives, minimizing the rich
backgrounds to make more pictorialist, and hence more
fashionable, images. Although not actively involved in
the studio, Nadar disapproved of these changes and,
after years of fi ghting, father and son were estranged
around 1885.
This estrangement proved to be brief as in 1886 the
Nadars worked together on the celebrated Entretien de
M. Nadar avec M. Chevreul, le jour de son centenaire
(M. Nadar Interviews M. Chevreul on his Hundredth
Birthday). Intended to illustrate scientifi c and techno-
logical progress, the photographs anticipated the photo-
graphic series and photojournalism. Originally made for
the newspaper L’Illustration, eight of the twenty-seven
photographs had a delayed debut on September 5, 1886,
in Le Journal Illustré. Termed the fi rst photo-interview, it
was to be a conversation between the noted chemist and
color theorist Eugène Chevreul and Félix Nadar on the
former’s birthday recorded by Nadar on a photophone
and photographed by Paul using a camera with a roll-
fi lm attachment, which due to technical problems had
to later be rewritten by Nadar.
In 1886, Paul Nadar took control of the Nadar Studio
and began photographing from a hot-air balloon as his
father had earlier, even photographing the infamous
fi re at the at l’Opéra Comique in 1887. He exhibited
these works at the Société française de la photographie
and was caricatured in the press as “The Fearless Paul
Nadar” for his courage and his photographic experimen-
tation. In 1890, Paul embarked on a trip across Europe
and Asia to Turkestan following the ancient silk route.
Paul acted as an early photojournalist, documenting his
travels and photographing sites as diverse as bazaars,
mosques, and desert landscapes. During his voyage,
he worked with experimental new equipment from
Eastman Kodak that used fl exible fi lms, which proved
more portable and instantaneous than the standard glass
plates. In 1893, he became the French agent for George
Eastman and Eastman Dry Plate & Film Company,
known as Eastman Kodak, and opened the fi rst Parisian
Offi ce of Photography, which sold photographic equip-
ment, including hand cameras, designed for amateur
photographers.
Paul presented his work to prominent photography
associations, including la Société Française de la Pho-
tographie and la Société des Hautes Etudes Commercia-
les. In 1891, he founded the journal Paris-Photographe,
which, despite publishing prominent pictorials, was in
fi nancial trouble by 1894. The same year, he married
Marie Degrandi, an actress at the Opéra Comique. In
1895, Félix Nadar offi cially transferred legal ownership
of the Nadar Studio to his son, which he ran until his
death on September 1, 1939. The Nadar studio, run by
Paul’s daughter, Marthe closed a few years after Paul’s
death. In 1950, Paul’s second wife, Anne Nadar, sold
the photographic collection, archives, and documents
from the Nadar studio to the French government. The
Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques et des
Sites acquired about 60,000 negatives while the Bib-
liothèque Nationale acquired all prints, archives, and
documents made by and concerning Félix and Paul
Nadar. Discovered amongst the 400,000 glass nega-
tives acquired by the Ministry of Education were Paul’s
photographs of Marcel Proust and his circle of friends
and family members. In 2001, Anne-Marie Bernard
edited a critically acclaimed book, The World of Proust,
as seen by Paul Nadar, which featured a selection of
these images.
Jennifer FarrellBiography
Paul Nadar was born on February 8, 1856, in Paris. He
was the only son of Ernestine and Félix Tournachon,
better known as Nadar. Paul Nadar was trained in pho-
tography by his father, the celebrated portraitist. First as
artistic director and later as manager, he ran his father’s