[Self-Portrait]

Nadar, about 1855

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Artist: Nadar (French, 1820–1910)
Medium: Salted paper prints from glass negatives
Size: Image: 20.5 × 17 cm (8 1/16 × 6 11/16 in.)
Culture: French
Museum: J. Paul Getty Museum
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

Before he dedicated himself to photography in the early 1850s, Nadar was—as he tells us in his autobiography of circa 1900—a poacher, a smuggler, a bureaucratic functionary, and a fighter for the cause of the Polish liberation. Nadar was the nickname Gaspard-Félix Tournachon used in the late 1840s to sign his stinging lithographic caricatures. While his drawing depended on bold exaggeration for their success, his photographs are marked by a spontaneous naturalism.

Nadar made numerous photographic self-portraits, which allowed him to experiment with poses, gestures, and lighting before turning the camera on his illustrious subjects. Gentle light falls from above, leaving the right side of his face in partial darkness. The writer Charles Baudelaire's homage, "Nadar, the most astonishing expression of vitality," applies easily to the intense young man gazing coyly but self-assuredly through heavily shadowed eyes at a point just above the lens of his own camera.

Perhaps Nadar was merely looking at an assistant helping to make the exposure, but he clearly intended to project an image of himself as the intense, Romantic artist. His left hand braces his body against the chair, while his right hand, cradling his chin and holding up his head, echoes the gesture of his left to create pictorial balance.

This photograph was taken at mid-career; Nadar was already a celebrated writer, caricaturist, and portrait photographer. He was thus free to play with self-representation, exploring the many personas that made up a complex and talented man.

Adapted from getty.edu, Interpretive Content Department, 2008; and Weston Naef, The J. Paul Getty Museum Handbook of the Photographs Collection (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), 55, © 1995 The J. Paul Getty Museum.

For more information about the artist and this work, see:

Begley, Adam. The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017.

Nadar. When I Was A Photographer Eduardo Cadava and Liana Theodoratu. Boston: MIT Press, 2015.

Text: J. Paul Getty Trust, CC BY 4.0.