When I Was a Photographer

A legendary book, imbued with the rogue personality of its author, finally appears in English, allowing us to wander with him through his memories of a key moment in our modernity. A vital contribution to our understanding of photography both then and now. -- Geoffrey Batchen, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand Eloquently nostalgic, discreetly ironic about nostalgia, these pages from another time tell us all kinds of witty, often oblique tales of photography -- from the air, underground, of the dead and the living, in and out of history. Nadar was many other things as well as a photographer but once he had started he never stopped being one, even when he wasn't using a camera. He hasn't stopped now. The deftly translated words of this book offer pictures that prove it. -- Michael Wood, Princeton University

The first complete English translation of Nadar's intelligent and witty memoir, a series of vignettes that capture his experiences in the early days of photography.

The first complete English translation of Nadar's intelligent and witty memoir, a series of vignettes that capture his experiences in the early days of photography.

Celebrated nineteenth-century photographer—and writer, actor, caricaturist, inventor, and balloonist—Félix Nadar published this memoir of his photographic life in 1900 at the age of eighty. Composed as a series of vignettes (we might view them as a series of “written photographs”), this intelligent and witty book offers stories of Nadar's experiences in the early years of photography, memorable character sketches, and meditations on history. It is a classic work, cited by writers from Walter Benjamin to Rosalind Krauss. This is its first and only complete English translation.

In When I Was a Photographer (Quand j'étais photographe), Nadar tells us about his descent into the sewers and catacombs of Paris, where he experimented with the use of artificial lighting, and his ascent into the skies over Paris in a hot air balloon, from which he took the first aerial photographs. He recounts his “postal photography” during the 1870-1871 Siege of Paris—an amazing scheme involving micrographic images and carrier pigeons. He describes technical innovations and important figures in photography, and offers a thoughtful consideration of society and culture; but he also writes entertainingly about such matters as Balzac's terror of being photographed, the impact of a photograph on a celebrated murder case, and the difference between male and female clients. Nadar's memoir captures, as surely as his photographs, traces of a vanished era.