the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar

Eduardo Cadava

Nadar’s Photographopolis

This lecture took place on December 7th, 2010 at 7:00pm in the Wollman Auditorium at the Cooper Union

Lecture introduction

In order to think about the different disciplinary settings for the production of art in contemporary life, I would like to return to Nadar’s much neglected memoirs, When I Was A Photographer.  Nadar’s enormous talents as photographer, aeronaut, caricaturist, entrepreneur, writer, journalist, and inventor may prevent us from registering and appreciating his speculative spirit, encouraging us to think of him as an artist and inventor rather than as a careful, rigorous thinker.  In these writings, the most exciting and exact of their kind, we can register an interpretive power, despite their sometimes chatty, capricious, and erratic character.  Presented in fourteen vignettes, the text comes to us as a series of snapshots-in-prose, each offering an allegory of different characteristics and features of the photographic world, what Nadar calls in his discussion of his aeronautic experiences, the “photographopolis.” This photographopolis not only refers to Paris as a city that is entirely photographic but to a world that, having become a series of images, is increasingly composed of proliferating copies, repetitions, reproductions, and simulacra.  The memoirs themselves appear as a machine of repetition, as if it were a palimpsestic anthology of his previous writings.  This is a constellation of the past and the present that seeks to offer a history of photography in the nineteenth century (Nadar was the first to use artificial lighting underground, when he photographed the catacombs underneath Paris, and the first to create aerial photographs, which he did from the hot air balloon he had built) and beyond.

About Eduardo Cadava

Eduardo Cadava teaches in the Department of English at Princeton University, where he also is an Associate Member of the Department of Comparative Literature, the School of Architecture, the Program in Latin American Studies, and the Center for African American Studies.  He is the author of Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History and Emerson and the Climates of History, and co-editor of Who Comes After the Subject?, Cities Without Citizens, and a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly entitled And Justice for All?:  The Claims of Human Rights.  He has published numerous articles on contemporary art and photography and he is presently co-directing a three-year collaborative project entitled The Itinerant Languages of Photography that includes photographers, artists, and scholars from the United States, Latin America, and Spain.

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