Rosalind Krauss: Tracing Nadar

Though it was written towards the end of his life, Nadar's memoir "My Life as a Photographer", was undertaken at a point when its author's activity in the medium had far from ceased. That is why the title's insistence on pastness (in French it is "Quand j'etais photographe), its declaration of a chapter's having closed, seems somewhat curious. But Nadar's past tense has less to do with his personal fortunes and the trajectory of his own career through time, than with his status as witness. The man born Gaspard-Felix Tournachon, who called himself Nadar, was aware that he had been present at an extraordinary event, and, like the survivor of some natural cataclysm, he felt duty-bound to report on what it had been like, or even more than that, to conjure for his listener the full intensity - emotional, physical, psychological - of that experience. Nadar writes his memoir with the urgency of the eyewitness and the conscience of a historian. Every passage of the text reverberates with this sense of responsibility.