Great Nadar by Adam Begley

Great Nadar by Adam Begley

A dazzling, stylish biography of a fabled Parisian photographer, adventurer, and pioneer.

A recent French biography begins, Who doesn't know Nadar? In France, that's a rhetorical question. Of all of the legendary figures who thrived in mid-19th-century Paris--a cohort that includes Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Gustave Courbet, and Alexandre Dumas--Nadar was perhaps the most innovative, the most restless, the most modern.

The first great portrait photographer, a pioneering balloonist, the first person to take an aerial photograph, and the prime mover behind the first airmail service, Nadar was one of the original celebrity artist-entrepreneurs. A kind of 19th-century Andy Warhol, he knew everyone worth knowing and photographed them all, conferring on posterity psychologically compelling portraits of Manet, Sarah Bernhardt, Delacroix, Daumier and countless others--a priceless panorama of Parisian celebrity.

Born Gaspard-F lix Tournachon, he adopted the pseudonym Nadar as a young bohemian, when he was a budding writer and cartoonist. Later he affixed the name Nadar to the fa ade of his opulent photographic studio in giant script, the illuminated letters ten feet tall, the whole sign fifty feet long, a garish red beacon on the boulevard. Nadar became known to all of Europe and even across the Atlantic when he launched The Giant, a gas balloon the size of a twelve-story building, the largest of its time. With his daring exploits aboard his humongous balloon (including a catastrophic crash that made headlines around the world), he gave his friend Jules Verne the model for one of his most dynamic heroes.

The Great Nadar is a brilliant, lavishly illustrated biography of a larger-than-life figure, a visionary whose outsized talent and canny self-promotion put him way ahead of his time.

Updike and The Great Nadar are written by Adam Begley. He was a Guggenheim Fellow, a Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellow, and the books editor of The New York Observer for many years. He resides in the United Kingdom.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781101902622
ISBN 10	1101902620
Title	Great Nadar
Author	Adam Begley
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	2018-07-10
Number of pages	256
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.