Nadar's studio at 35 Boulevard des Capucines

A few months after the French photographer Félix Nadar opened a newly enlarged, ambitious studio at 35, boulevard des Capucines in 1861, he staged a celebratory photograph of the facade of his business (fig. 1). While showcasing staff members gathered on the roof, fiacres parked along the curb, and an ostentatious gaslit sign applied across the two top...

~Although Maurisset’s 1840 caricature of Paris overrun with photographers and Daumier’s 1840s lithographs of intrepid operators gave the new entrepreneurs great visibility, the real growth of the profession occurred a decade later during the Second Empire. In the...