Book cover of When I Was a Photographer

Book description

The first complete English translation of Nadar's intelligent and witty memoir, a series of vignettes that capture his experiences in the early days of photography.

Celebrated nineteenth-century photographer—and writer, actor, caricaturist, inventor, and balloonist—FĂ©lix Nadar published this memoir of his photographic life in 1900 at the age of eighty. Composed


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Why read it?

1 author picked When I Was a Photographer as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I’ve always loved the portraits the photographer FĂ©lix Nadar made of nineteenth-century Parisian celebrities such as Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire.

I went to this book—Nadar’s memoir—to learn more about the making of those pictures. There is a little bit of that, but what really gripped me was the weird and wonderful shaggy dog stories Nadar tells about his adventures in ‘aerostatic photography’—taking pictures from balloons.

Spoiler alert: there is a lot of crashing.

From Peter's list on the history of popular photography.

If you love When I Was a Photographer...

Book cover of These Blue Mountains

These Blue Mountains by Sarah Loudin Thomas,

A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.

German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda


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