Although Eduardo Cadava’s introduction to this first-ever complete English translation of Quand j’étais photographe positions Nadar’s photography as a form of mourning, the subject himself refuses to take this line. With good-natured impetuosity, boundless curiosity, self-deprecating wit, and often foolhardy courage, the unconventional memoirs of Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, 1820–1910) are more impressionistic than documentary, more bemused than abject.

Aside from his portraits of French literary and artistic celebrities, Félix Nadar (born Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, 1820–1910) is best known for his aerial photography and his images of the catacombs and sewers of Paris. Although Nadar often looks back to the eighteenth century as a “heroic age” of scientific invention and inquiry, his own time was no less active, with a wealth of discovery and innovation in transportation, medicine, science, mechanics, and, of course, photography. He was also a formidable and opinionated art critic (“the homunculus Meissonier, obstinate in his pedicular painting”) as well as a caricaturist, actor, and novelist who seems to have known virtually everyone of interest in nineteenth-century Paris. What Nadar lacked in scientific education or intellect, he made up for in perseverance and energetic application. Most endearing is his honesty about how bad he is at math: “my innate terror of anything that resembles the execrable number.”

Neither a scientist nor a mathematician, Nadar nevertheless became a successful if sometimes gullible businessman. In “Female and Male Clients,” he assures aspiring photographers to seek honor before profit, though this will be difficult, as his hilarious war