When I was a photographer. Nadar

Nadar (Gaspar Felix Tournashon, 1820-1910) is one of the main photographers of the 19th century, and according to Rolan Bart, the greatest photographer in the world is completely. He began as a journalist and cartoonist, but became famous as a portraitist photographer. His photos of Alexander Dumas Sr. and Emil Zola, Eduard Manet and Claude Monet, Georges Sand and Sarah Bernard look implausible modern and very directly. It is thanks to Nadar that we can see in them living people picturesque and graphic portraits, no matter how good they are, do not give such an effect. In addition, Nadar became the first person who mastered (and patented! As he himself would not fail to emphasize), he managed to take the first picture from the basket of a balloon. Nadar was an amazing person who combined the children's excitement of the discoverer, a subtle artistic taste (if not a flair), the talkativeness and boastfulness of a simple burgher with the insight of a real businessman. And all these features were reflected in the book. At first glance, “when I was a photographer” can be classified as representatives of a specific genre of elegant word -block. The book consists of 12 stories: Nadar takes pictures of the famous Parisian catacombs, for the first time using artificial lighting; it lists the merits of his photographic predecessors; then it rises completely naked on a half -twoted balloon in order to finally be able to make the world's first frame from the air; It accidentally gives an official posthumous portrait of the wrong mourning woman and so on. But in fact, behind all these often quite boastful stories, baroque constructions and hypnotic enumerations of the names lies a thin and sensitive analysis of the outgoing era, its era.