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Subterranean Paris: Félix Nadar’s Descent Into the Parisian Underground

An excerpt from the celebrated 19th-century photographer's memoir "When I Was a Photographer."

In 1900, at the age of 80, the pioneering photographer Félix Nadar published his memoir Quand j’étais photographe (“When I Was a Photographer”). It was finally translated into English in 2015. Composed as a series of 14 vignettes, “When I Was a Photographer” is one of the most wonderful accounts we have not only of Nadar’s richly intense and compelling life but also of the early decades of photography. Charming, often humorous, and imbued with the author’s rogue personality, each vignette functions as an opening onto the reading labyrinth that is at once Nadar’s life and text. In the excerpt from the book that follows — two isolated passages from an entry titled “Subterranean Paris,” accompanied by a handful of photographs — Nadar chronicles his descent into the sewers and catacombs of Paris, where he experimented with the use of artificial lighting, producing the first images of their kind.