Félix Nadar: The world’s first celebrity photographer

BBC: Félix Nadar is a legend in his native France. A tall, exuberant red-haired dynamo with a fascination for fame, he came to know everyone who was anyone in his career as a journalist and caricaturist. Instinctively understanding the emerging interest in celebrity – and the role photography could play in it – he created psychologically complex portraits of the leading artists, writers and actors of mid-19th-Century Paris which managed to turn the nascent medium into an artform.
His studio hosted the first Impressionist exhibition and he took the world’s first aerial photo: Félix Nadar lived an extraordinary life, as Cath Pound discovers.