Self portrait of Nadar, c. 1860 Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (6 April 1820 – 20 March 1910), known by the pseudonym Nadar; French photographer, caricaturist, journalist, novelist, and balloonist (or, more accurately, proponent of manned flight).... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadar_(photographer)] Gaspard-Félix Tournachon was among Paris’s foremost polymaths. In addition to perfecting the art of aerial photography, he was also an accomplished cartoonist and entrepreneur. At the age of 37, Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, more commonly known as Nadar, went up in a hot-air balloon for the first time. It was a life-changing experience for the Parisian portrait photographer, whose unstinting activities had moved his friend Charles Baudelaire to describe him as “the most astonishing expression of vitality” he had ever seen.... Nadar’s first photographic studio was an outdoor one on the Rue Saint-Lazare (wags re-christened it Rue Saint-Nadar). Visitors crossed a reception room, decorated with a half-dozen romantic paintings by Gustave Doré, before stepping out into a “ravishingly beautiful” courtyard garden. It was here that Nadar learned to appreciate all the different ways that natural light could imbue a photograph. As he wrote: “It’s the artistic appreciation of the effects produced by various qualities of lighting alone or combined—it’s the application of this or that effect according to the nature of the physiognomy that as an artist you aim to reproduce.” One of Nadar’s first celebrity subjects was Baudelaire, whom he photographed over an 8-year period. ...what made Nadar such a compelling personality—what drew so many disparate personalities toward him—was his range of passionate engagement, his effervescence. Nadar’s “true genius” could not be limited to the confines of portrait photography. [https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-great-nadar-1499454926] undefined

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