Nadar’s Photography of Subterranean Paris: Mapping the Urban Body

Abstract

Félix Nadar, a renowned caricaturist, portrait photographer, and aeronaut, took nearly one hundred albumen prints of the Paris catacombs and sewers by electric light in the early 1860s. More than a demonstration of technical innovation in bringing the mythic underground to light, this crucial archive constitutes a metaphorical mapping of the metabolism of the urban body during Haussmannisation. Nadar’s work articulates the city’s relation to its exclusions – decay and filth – and its struggle to cleanse and regulate human remains and wastes. He not only engaged with historical memory, sanitary reform, and scientific development, but also expanded the aesthetics of the sublime and the uncanny by experimenting with different states of perceptibility and the psychological force of shadows. In the context of topographical photography in the mid nineteenth century, the underground series presents Nadar’s meaningful elaboration of photographic Romanticism and reveals his attitudes toward the urban transformation and tourist spectacle of Paris.

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