Photography was once new. The French photographer known as Nadar (born Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, 1820-1910) dramatically described the introduction of this medium to our world:
Exploding unexpectedly, totally unexpectedly, surpassing all possible expectations, diverting everything that we thought we knew and even what could be hypothesized, the new discovery indeed appeared as, and still is, the most extraordinary in the constellation of inventions that already have made our still unfinished century—in absence of other virtues—the greatest of the scientific centuries.
Photography’s invention was, for Nadar, unexpected—a surprise. Transforming “everything that we thought we knew and even what could be hypothesized,” photography was an allegorical technology: both a novel technology and a medium whose history could be extrapolated to explain the process of invention writ large.
This passage comes from Nadar’s idiosyncratic book Quand j’étais photographe (When I Was a Photographer) published in 1900. The semi-autobiographical collection of short, distinct chapter-length texts puts Nadar’s infamous photographic firsts—the first aerial photograph, the first photographs by electric light, and the first photographs in the sewers and catacombs of Paris, among others—in constellation with many of the other inventions of the nineteenth century, aligning photographic novelty with other large-scale social, political, and technological transformations.
According to Nadar, Balzac believed that a photograph was a material remnant of that which had been photographed, the resulting image akin to a spectral skin peeled off its subject.
Most of Quand j’étais photographe had been originally published in the 1890s as a series of articles in his son Paul’s journal Paris-Photographe. In kaleidoscopic fashion, the book recounts many canonical events in the history of photography, alongside some lesser-known stories. But rather than simply repeat the even-then ossified list of events leading to the invention of photography and the medium’s later innovations, the book uses a series of stories, reminiscences, and tall tales to describe how photography transformed everyday (and not so everyday) experience. Photography, Nadar suggests, is a key example of the impact of technology on modern life.
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Technical novelty is often registered in the awe, surprise, or fear experienced by the user or audience. Such intense emotions are frequently recorded in reports of the introduction of new media. The first chapter of Nadar’s book, “Balzac and the Daguerreotype,” describes just such an encounter, recounting the French realist writer Honoré de Balzac’s reported fear of being photographed.
Writing in the last decade of the nineteenth century, more than fifty years after the announcement of the French state’s purchase of the daguerreotype process in 1839, Nadar suggests that readers would do well to remember this “universal stupefaction” experienced in response to the introduction of photography. In his estimation, a recurring disbelief in the possibility of new technologies causes individuals to react in fear rather than appreciation when confronted by the new. “[B]y nature,” Nadar writes, “we are hostile to everything that disconcerts our received ideas and disturbs our habits.” For Nadar, this was a problem. When individuals with power to facilitate the development of new technologies—for example, members of the powerful French Académie—fail to believe in the possibility of the new ideas presented to them, technology (read society) is doomed to stagnate. The phonograph, Nadar reminds us, had just recently been dismissed as a “ventriloquist hoax” by a “member of the Institute.”
But, as Nadar queries, was “Balzac’s terror before the Daguerreotype…sincere or simulated?” In the text, the author’s “terror” of photography is attributed to his (mis)understanding of photographic materiality. Ventriloquizing Balzac, Nadar writes
Each body in nature is composed of a series of specters, in infinitely superimposed layers, foliated into infinitesimal pellicules, in all directions in which the optic perceives this body.
Since man is unable to create—that is to constitute from an apparition, from the impalpable, a solid thing, or to make a thing out of nothing—, every Daguerreian operation would catch, detach, and retain, by fixing onto itself, one of the layers of the photographed body. It follows that for that body, and with every repeated operation, there was an evident loss of one of its specters, which is to say, of a part of its constitutive essence.
According to Nadar, Balzac believed that a photograph was a material remnant of that which had been photographed, the resulting image akin to a spectral skin peeled off its subject. Balzac’s purported philosophy of photography is likely derived from the Epicurean Roman poet Lucretius’s account of the nature of images. For Lucretius, reflections on the surface of water or a mirror—in antiquity, made of metal, not unlike the surface of a daguerreotype—are a model for understanding the atomistic universe and the nature of vision.
Balzac’s “theory” of photography as a skinning of the filmic layers of the material world also helps Nadar to articulate an epistemological point: “Man is unable to create,” nor to “make a thing out of nothing.” Balzac himself put it in these terms in his 1847 novel Cousin Pons. Embedded in a philosophical interlude occasioned by the plotting landlady Mme Cibot’s visit to a fortune teller, Balzac describes the unlikeliness of photography’s invention:
The steam engine was condemned as absurd, aerial navigation is still said to be absurd, so in their time were the inventions of gunpowder, printing, spectacles, engraving, and that latest great discovery of all—the daguerreotype. If any man had come to Napoleon to tell him that a building or figure is at all times and in all places represented by an image in the atmosphere, that every existing object has a spectral intangible double which may become visible, the Emperor would have sent his informant to Charenton for a lunatic.
These inventions, described as unfamiliar or even unlikely, are like “image[s] in the atmosphere.” Several pages later, Balzac explicitly aligns the predictive power of fortune telling with the creative power of invention, suggesting that both are parallel modes for thinking about the future: “Certain beings have the power of discerning the future in its germ-form,” just like “the great inventor sees a glimpse of the industry latent in his invention, or a science in something that happens every day unnoticed by ordinary eyes.” The acts of inventing and telling the future are cut from the same cloth,
as the world of ideas is cut out, so to speak, on the pattern of the physical world…As, for instance, a corporeal body actually projects an image upon the atmosphere—a spectral double detected and recorded by the daguerreotype; so also ideas, having a real and effective existence, leave an impression, as it were, upon the atmosphere of the spiritual world; they likewise produce effects, and exist spectrally…, and certain human beings are endowed with the faculty of discerning these ‘forms’ or traces of ideas.
Balzac parallels the photographic image and the latent idea. This concept greatly appealed to Nadar as he certainly imagined himself capable of “discerning” these “traces of ideas.” As a photographer, and the originator of many photographic firsts, Nadar positioned himself as an inventor (catching “a glimpse of the industry latent in his invention”) and an impassioned advocate for a society better attuned to welcoming new technical ideas. The story of Balzac’s understanding of photography thus offers Nadar a chance to argue that, to better ready oneself to receive these ideas from the atmosphere, one had to tame the “universal stupefaction” that was the commonly held response to the introduction of new technologies.
Nadar deployed Balzac’s reported initial mistrust and later acquiescence to the daguerreotype as an allegory of larger significance for understanding the history of invention.
This stupor could be overcome. In fact, Nadar reportedly once had a daguerreotype of Balzac taken by Louis-Auguste Bisson in his personal collection. A photomechanical reproduction of the daguerreotype was published in the same issue of Paris-Photographe as Nadar’s essay on Balzac. In the pages of Nadar’s essay and in his personal collection, Balzac had overcome his reputed “fear,” and his likeness had been permanently etched on the surface of the daguerreotype. In print and in theory, “Balzac and the Daguerreotype” describes the integration of new media into the everyday.
Balzac’s rapprochement with the daguerreotype was made material by the object in Nadar’s own collection (and its reproduction in his son’s journal), a process of familiarization that could stand in for a larger societal transition from awesome reception to widespread acceptance of new technological ideas. With anthropological specificity, Nadar attends to the duality of enchantment and disenchantment accompanying the introduction and adoption of new technologies.
But more than esoteric superstition—or, as Nadar puts it, “a vague apprehension of the Daguerreian operation”—Nadar’s written account of Balzac’s photographic reticence is also an example of what the anthropologist Michael Taussig has called the “mimesis of mimesis.” Taussig, describing a scene from filmmaker Robert Flaherty’s 1922 film Nanook of the North where an Inuk man, Allakariallak (the titular Nanook), bites a phonograph record, suggests that accounts of the “alleged primitivism” of those encountering a novel technology are just as much about those doing the accounting.
Or, as the anthropologist and art historian Christopher Pinney has put it, summing up similarly anthropological accounts of “primitive” enchantment with modern technologies of reproduction, “the native’s ‘difficulty’ with photography provides the alibi for the modern’s own desire to find in the photographer the descendants of ‘augurs and haruspices’.” In other words, reports of awesome encounters with new technologies allows the person doing the recounting to articulate the magic of the new.
For Nadar, the story of Balzac and the daguerreotype indexed Nadar’s own, almost ethnographic, desire to articulate the historical significance of the introduction of photography. The question of whether Balzac’s fear was real is perhaps less interesting than the work the story does to position the fearful encounter as simply a symptom of innovation.
This shift—from novelty to acculturation—was, for Nadar, indicative of a transformation of historical experience initiated by a period of unparalleled technological change. As individuals witnessed the introduction and popularization of numerous new media and technologies across the nineteenth century, there was an overwhelming sense that the “proliferation of germinating ideas” unleashed in the wake of the “glorious haste of photography’s birth” was speeding up the process of technological development and its impact on social life.
Writing in the early 1890s, Nadar deployed Balzac’s reported initial mistrust and later acquiescence to the daguerreotype as an allegory of larger significance for understanding the history of invention. By recounting, again and again, how “ideas” became material “facts,” Nadar worked to assimilate the concept of technological development as a social good—often placing the photographic first as an emblem of this process. In the following chapters of Quand j’étais photographe, Nadar plays on the rhetorical and material slipperiness of invention to craft a curious portrait of photography’s first fifty-odd years.
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From Inventing Nadar: A History of Photographic Firsts by Emily Doucet. Copyright © 2026. Available from Duke University Press.
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