Inventing Nadar: A History of Photographic Firsts (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781478033721)

Félix Nadar took the first aerial photograph in 1858, so the story goes. The evidence, Emily Doucet notes, is mixed. In Inventing Nadar, Doucet analyzes the historical and material production of the nineteenth-century Parisian photographer's famous and numerous photographic firsts. Focusing on these oft-labeled groundbreaking elements of his career, she deconstructs Nadar's legacy as a prime protagonist in the history of photography by interrogating the media techniques used to construct his invention narratives. Doucet highlights this highly mediated process as one that canonized novel applications of photography as discrete techniques with single authors and inventors. Looking to this process of mediation through the institutions and individuals that shaped Nadar's archives, Doucet unpacks assumptions of Nadar as a master of early photography and shows how the medium is enmeshed in larger histories of media, science, and technology. The result is both a new account of Nadar's place in photographic history and a critical study of how stories of innovation take shape.

Author: Emily Doucet
ISBN-10: 147803372X
ISBN-13: 9781478033721
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English
Published: 04/21/2026
Pages: 238
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.26lbs