Levels of Life

  Photography, like jazz, was a sudden, contemporary art which achieved technical excellence very quickly. And once it became able to leave the confines of the studio, it tended to spread horizontally, out and across. In 1851 the French government set up the Heliographic Mission, which dispatched five photographers across the land to record the buildings (and ruins) that made up the national patrimony. Two years earlier, it had been a Frenchman who first photographed the Sphinx and the Pyramids. Nadar was less interested in the horizontal than the vertical, in height and depth. His portraits surpass those of his contemporaries because they go deeper. He said that the theory of photography could be learnt in an hour, and its techniques in a day; but what couldn’t be taught were a sense of light, a grasp of the moral intelligence of the sitter, and ‘the psychological side of photography – the word doesn’t seem too ambitious to me’. He relaxed his subjects with chatter, while modelling them with lamps, screens, veils, mirrors and reflectors. The poet Théodore de Banville called him ‘a novelist and caricaturist hunting his prey’. It was the novelist who took these psychological portraits, and who concluded that the vainest sitters were actors, closely followed by soldiers. The same novelist also spotted one key difference between the sexes: when a couple who had been jointly photographed returned to examine their proofs, the wife always looked first at the portrait of her husband – and so did the husband. Such was humanity’s self-love, Nadar concluded, that most were inevitably disappointed when they finally saw a true image of themselves.

  Moral and psychological depth; also physical depth. Nadar was the first to photograph the Paris sewers, where he made twenty-three images. He also descended into the Catacombs, those sewer-like ossuaries where bones were stacked after the cemetery clearances of the 1780s. Here, he needed an eighteen-minute exposure. This was no problem for the dead, of course; but to ape the living, Nadar draped and dressed mannequins, and gave them parts to play – watchman, bone-stacker, labourer pulling a wagon full of skulls and femurs.

  And this left height. The things Nadar put together that had not been put together before were two of his three emblems of modernity: photography and aeronautics.

  First, a darkroom had to be built in the balloon’s cradle, with doubled curtains of black and orange; inside was the merest flicker of a lamp. The new wet-plate technique consisted of coating a glass sheet with collodion, then sensitising it in a solution of silver nitrate. But it was a cumbersome process which required deft handling, so Nadar was accompanied by a plate preparer. The camera was a Dallmeyer, with a special horizontal shutter Nadar had patented. Near Petit-Bicêtre, in the north of Paris, on a day of little wind in the autumn of 1858, the two men made their ascent in a tethered balloon, and took the world’s first sky-based photograph. Back down at the local auberge which served as their headquarters, they excitedly developed the plate.

  And found nothing. Or rather, nothing but a muddy soot-black expanse with no trace of an image. They tried again, and failed; tried a third time, and failed again. Suspecting that the baths might contain impurities, they filtered and refiltered them, to no effect. They changed all the chemicals, but still it made no difference. Time was passing, winter was approaching, and the great experiment had not worked. Then, as Nadar relates in his memoirs, he was sitting one day beneath an apple tree (a Newtonian coincidence which perhaps stretches credulity), when suddenly he understood the problem. ‘The persistent failure derived from the fact that the neck of the balloon, always left open during ascents, allowed hydrosulphuric gas to stream out into my silver baths.’ So the next time, once sufficient height had been reached, he closed off the gas valve – a dangerous procedure in itself, which might cause the aerostat to explode. The prepared plate was exposed, and back at the auberge Nadar was rewarded with an image, faint but discernible, of the three buildings beneath the tethered balloon: farm, auberge and gendarmerie. Two white pigeons could be seen on the farm roof; in the lane was a stopped cart, its occupant wondering at the contraption floating in the sky.

  This first picture did not survive, except in Nadar’s memory and our subsequent imagination; nor did any others he took in the next ten years. The only images of his aerostatic experiments date from 1868. One shows an eight-part, multi-lens view of streets leading to the Arc de Triomphe; another looks across the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne (now Avenue Foch) towards Les Ternes and Montmartre.

  On the 23rd of October 1858, Nadar duly took out patent no. 38 509 for ‘A new system of aerostatic photography’. But the process proved technically difficult and commercially unprofitable. The lack of public response was also discouraging. He himself imagined two practical applications for his ‘new system’. First, it would transform land surveying: from a balloon you could map a million square metres, or a hundred hectares, in one go; and make ten such observations in the course of a day. Its second use would be in military reconnaissance: a balloon could act as a ‘travelling church steeple’. This in itself was not new: the Revolutionary Army had used one at the Battle of Fleurus in 1794, while the expeditionary force Napoleon took to Egypt included a Corps d’Aérostation equipped with four balloons (destroyed by Nelson at Aboukir Bay). The addition of photography, however, would clearly give any half-competent general the edge. Yet who should first seek to exploit this possibility? Only the hated Napoleon III, who in 1859 offered Nadar 50,000 francs for his services in the coming war with Austria. The photographer declined. As for the peacetime use of his patent, Nadar was assured by his ‘very eminent friend Colonel Laudesset’ that (for reasons unstated) aerial land surveying was ‘impossible’. Frustrated, and ever restless, he moved on, leaving the field of aerostatic photography to the Tissandier brothers, to Jacques Ducom, and to his own son, Paul Nadar.

  He moved on. During the Prussian siege of Paris, he set up the Compagnie d’Aérostatiers Militaires to provide a communications link to the outside world. Nadar dispatched ‘siege balloons’ – one of them named the Victor Hugo, another the George Sand – from the Place St-Pierre in Montmartre, bearing letters, reports to the French government, and intrepid aeronauts. The first flight left on 23 September 1870 and landed safely in Normandy; its postbag contained a letter from Nadar to The Times of London, which printed it, in full and in French, five days later. This postal service continued throughout the siege, though some balloons were shot down by the Prussians, and all depended on the wind. One ended up in a Norwegian fjord.

  The photographer was always famous: Victor Hugo once addressed an envelope with the single word ‘Nadar’, and still the letter got to him. In 1862 his friend Daumier caricatured him in a lithograph called Nadar Raising Photography to the Level of Art. It depicts him crouched over his camera in the basket of a balloon high above Paris, whose every house is plastered with advertisements for PHOTOGRAPHIE. And if Art was often wary or fearful of Photography, that hustling, arriviste medium, it paid regular, easeful homage to aeronautics. Guardi showed a balloon hovering calmly over Venice; Manet portrayed The Giant making its last ascent (with Nadar on board) from Les Invalides. Painters from Goya to Douanier Rousseau made balloons float serenely in a serener sky: the celestial version of pastoral.

  But the artist who made the most compelling single image of ballooning was Odilon Redon, and he disagreed. Redon had witnessed The Giant in flight, and also Henri Giffard’s ‘Great Captive Balloon’, which starred at the Paris Exhibitions of 1867 and 1878. In the latter year he produced a charcoal drawing called Eye Balloon. At first sight it seems just a witty visual pun: the sphere of the balloon and the sphere of the eye are conflated into one, as a vast orb hovers over a grey landscape. The eye balloon has its eyelid open, so that the eyelash makes a fringe round the top of the canopy. Dangling from the balloon is a cradle in which squats a rough hemispherical shape: the top half of a human head. But the tone of the image is new and sinister. We could not be further from ballooning’s established tropes: freedom, spiritual exaltation, human progress. Redon’s eternally open eye is deeply unsettling. The ey
e in the sky; God’s security camera. And that lumpish human head invites us to conclude that the colonisation of space doesn’t purify the colonisers; all that has happened is that we have brought our sinfulness to a new location.

  Aeronautics and photography were scientific advances with practical civic consequences. And yet, in their early years, an aura of mystery and magic surrounded each of them. Those bug-eyed yokels running after the trailing anchor of a balloon might have expected Simon Magus to descend from it just as much as Sarah the Divine. And photography seemed to threaten more than just a sitter’s amour propre. It wasn’t only forest dwellers who feared that the camera might steal their soul. Nadar recalled that Balzac had a theory of the self, according to which a person’s essence was made up of a near-infinite series of spectral layers, one superimposed on the next. The novelist further believed that during the ‘Daguerrean operation’ one such layer was stripped away and retained by the magic instrument. Nadar couldn’t remember if this layer was supposedly lost for ever, or whether regeneration was possible; though he cheekily suggested that, given Balzac’s corpulence, he had less to fear than most from having a few spectral layers removed. But this theory – or apprehension – wasn’t unique to Balzac. It was shared by his writer friends Gautier and Nerval, making up what Nadar termed a ‘cabbalistic trio’.

  Félix Tournachon was an uxorious man. He had married Ernestine in September 1854. It was a sudden wedding which surprised his friends: the bride was an eighteen-year-old from the Protestant bourgeoisie of Normandy. True, she had a dowry; and marriage was a useful way for Félix of escaping Life with Mother. But for all his divagations, the relationship appears to have been as tender as it was long. Tournachon quarrelled with his only brother and his only son; both were written – or wrote themselves – out of his life. Ernestine was always there. If there was a pattern to his life, she provided it. She was with him at the crash of The Giant near Hanover. Her money helped pay for his studio; later, the business was put in her name.

  In 1887, hearing of a fire at the Opéra Comique, and believing her son Paul to be there, Ernestine suffered a stroke. Félix immediately moved the household out of Paris to the Forest of Sénart, where he owned a property called L’Hermitage. They stayed there for the next eight years. In 1893 Edmond de Goncourt described the ménage in his Journal:

  … At its centre is Mme Nadar, aphasiac, looking like an old white-haired professor. She is lying down, wrapped in a sky-blue dressing gown lined with pink silk. Next to her, Nadar takes the part of the tender nurse, tucking her brightly coloured gown around her, easing the hair off her temples, touching and stroking her all the time.

  Her dressing gown is bleu de ciel, the colour of the sky in which they no longer flew. Both were grounded now. In 1909, after fifty-five years of marriage, Ernestine died. That same year, Louis Blériot flew the Channel, a final endorsement of Nadar’s belief in heavier-than-air flight; the balloonist sent the aviator a telegram of congratulations. While Blériot went up into the air, Ernestine went down into the ground. While Blériot flew, Nadar had lost his rudder. He did not survive Ernestine long; he died in March 1910, surrounded by his dogs and cats.

  By now, few remembered his achievement at Petit-Bicêtre in the autumn of 1858. And the aerostatic photographs that exist are of only passable quality: we must imagine the excitement back into them. But they represent a moment when the world grew up. Or perhaps that is too melodramatic, and too hopeful. Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery. Still, this was an instant of cognitive change. The vestigial human outline on a cave wall, the first mirror, the development of portraiture, the science of photography – these were advances which allowed us to look at ourselves better, with increasing truth. And even if the world was largely unaware at the time of events at Petit-Bicêtre, the change could not be unchanged, unmade. And the sin of height was purged.

  Once, the peasant had looked up at the heavens, where God lived, fearing thunder, hail, and God’s anger, hoping for sun, a rainbow, and God’s approval. Now, the modern peasant looked up at the heavens and saw instead the less daunting arrival of Colonel Fred Burnaby, cigar in one pocket and half-sovereign in the other, of Sarah Bernhardt and her autobiographical chair, of Félix Tournachon in his airborne wicker cottage, complete with refreshment room, lavatory and photographic department.

  Nadar’s only surviving aerostatic photographs date from 1868. Exactly a century later, in December 1968, the Apollo 8 mission lifted off for its journey to the moon. On Christmas Eve, the spacecraft passed behind the far side of the moon and entered lunar orbit. As it emerged, the astronauts were the first humans to see a phenomenon for which a new word was needed: ‘earthrise’. The pilot of the lunar module, William Anders, using a specially adapted Hasselblad camera, photographed a two-thirds-full Earth soaring in a night sky. His pictures show it in luscious colour, with feathery cloud cover, swirling storm systems, rich blue seas and rusty continents. Major General Anders later reflected:

  I think it was the Earthrise that really kind of got everybody in the solar plexus … We were looking back at our planet, the place where we evolved. Our Earth was quite colorful, pretty and delicate compared to the very rough, rugged, beat-up, even boring lunar surface. I think it struck everybody that here we’d come 240,000 miles to see the Moon and it was the Earth that was really worth looking at.

  At the time, Anders’s photos were as disturbing as they were beautiful; and they remain so today. To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock. But it was the flame-haired Félix Tournachon – if only from a height of a few hundred metres, if only in black and white, if only in a few local views of Paris – who first put two things together.

  ON THE LEVEL

  You put together two things that have not been put together before; and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Pilâtre de Rozier, the first man to ascend in a fire balloon, also planned to be the first to fly the Channel from France to England. To this end he constructed a new kind of aerostat, with a hydrogen balloon on top, to give greater lift, and a fire balloon beneath, to give better control. He put these two things together, and on the 15th of June 1785, when the winds seemed favourable, he made his ascent from the Pas-de-Calais. The brave new contraption rose swiftly, but before it had even reached the coastline, flame appeared at the top of the hydrogen balloon, and the whole, hopeful aerostat, now looking to one observer like a heavenly gas lamp, fell to earth, killing both pilot and co-pilot.

  You put together two people who have not been put together before; and sometimes the world is changed, sometimes not. They may crash and burn, or burn and crash. But sometimes, something new is made, and then the world is changed. Together, in that first exaltation, that first roaring sense of uplift, they are greater than their two separate selves. Together, they see further, and they see more clearly.

  Of course, love may not be evenly matched; perhaps it rarely is. To put it another way: how did those besieged Parisians of 1870–71 get replies to their letters? You can fly a balloon out from the Place St-Pierre and assume it will land somewhere useful; but you can hardly expect the winds, however patriotic, to blow it back to Montmartre on a return flight. Various stratagems were proposed: for example, placing the return correspondence in large metal globes and floating them downstream into the city, there to be caught in nets. Pigeon post was a more obvious idea, and a Batignolles pigeon fancier put his dovecote at the authorities’ disposal: a basket of birds might be flown out with each siege balloon, and return bearing letters. But compare the freight capacity of a balloon and a pigeon, and imagine the weight of disappointment. According to Nadar, the solution came from an engineer who worked in sugar manufacture. Letters intended for Paris were to be written in a clear hand, on one side of the paper, with the recipient’s address at the top. Then, at the collecting station, hundreds of them would be laid side by side on a larg
e screen and photographed. The image would be micrographically reduced, flown into Paris by carrier pigeon, and enlarged back to readable size. The revived letters were then put into envelopes and delivered to their addressees. It was better than nothing; indeed, it was a technical triumph. But imagine a pair of lovers, one able to write privately and at length on both sides of the page, and hide the tenderest words in an envelope; the other constrained by brevity and the knowledge that private feelings might be publicly inspected by photographers and postmen. Although – isn’t that how love sometimes feels, and works?

  Sarah Bernhardt was photographed by Nadar – first the father, later the son – throughout her life. Her first session took place when she was about twenty, at the time Félix Tournachon was also involved in another tumultuous, if briefer, career: that of The Giant. Sarah is not yet Divine – she is unknown, aspiring; yet the portraits already show her a star. She is simply posed, wrapped in a velvet cloak, or an enveloping shawl. Her shoulders are bare; she wears no jewellery except a small pair of cameo earrings; her hair is virtually undressed. So is she: there is more than a hint that she wears little beneath that cloak, that shawl. Her expression is withholding, and thus alluring. She is, of course, very beautiful, perhaps more so to the modern eye than at the time. She seems to embody truthfulness, theatricality and mystery – and make those abstractions compatible. Nadar also took a nude photograph which some claim is of her. It shows a woman, naked to the waist, peek-a-booing with one eye from behind a spread fan. Whatever the case, the portraits of Sarah cloaked and shawled are decidedly more erotic.