Emile Zola 

This is a photograph of Émile Zola, taken in Paris by Félix Nadar. Nadar was a portrait photographer, but he was also so much more than that: caricaturist, journalist, novelist, and balloonist. He was a real cultural entrepreneur in the France of the Second Empire and the early Third Republic. He captured many leading artists and writers of his day, from Baudelaire to Sarah Bernhardt. Photography at this time occupied a fascinating place in the art world: it was both a new technology and a new form of artistic expression. Nadar's portraits offered a democratizing counterpoint to academic painting, though still dependent on the economic and technological resources of modern Paris. Zola himself, as a writer committed to social realism, was fascinated by photography. To understand the impact of this image, we must turn to the archives, to the history of photographic technology, and to the place of both Nadar and Zola in the cultural life of their time.