It's pleasant to see how this rhetoric works. Theory means little, practice less. Successfully shifting the terms of debate from the technical to the artistic robs actual photographic experts of all their cultural authority. In an instant, the technology's originators dwindle into the miserable nerdish status of the "laboratory assistant."
The crux of photography now becomes a matter of innate talent, a question of personal gifts. Inspiration knows no baud rate. As Nadar remarked later: "In photography as in everything else there are people who know how to see and others who don't even know how to look." This is a splendid kind of audacity, the sign of a subculture which is not beleaguered and defensive but confident, alert and aggressively omnivorous.
It's a mark of Nadar's peculiar genius that he was able to devour photography and thrive while digesting it, rather than recoiling in future shock like his contemporary and close friend Baudelaire. In 1859 Baudelaire wrote a long screed against photography, in which he decried its threat to aesthetics and the avante- garde.
"...(I)t is nonetheless obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy.... If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude that is its natural ally."
Baudelaire nevertheless posed for Nadar's camera. In fact Baudelaire admired Nadar very much, aptly describing Nadar as an "astounding example of vitality." Baudelaire's photo is on page 67 and Nadar's portrait of the author of FLOWERS OF EVIL is without any doubt the single most remarkable image in the Nadar collection.
Despite the fact that he has stuffed one mitt into an oversized double-breasted coat in Napoleonic fashion, Baudelaire looks shockingly contemporary. It's a face that you could see tomorrow in SPY or SPIN or INTERVIEW, sharp, slightly contemptuous, utterly self-possessed. The photograph is 1855, two years before the police seizure and legal condemnation of FLOWERS OF EVIL.
The Goncourt Brothers said that Baudelaire had "the face of a maniac, a voice that cuts like steel." There is no recorded trace of his voice, but the face Nadar preserved for us is indeed maniacal -- which is to say, the face of someone not from the Goncourts' century, but rather from our own. Baudelaire looked like a maniac because he looks just like one of us.
FLOWERS OF EVIL is probably the greatest literary monument of the Paris Bohemia, a book which after 136 years remains in many ways novel, frightening and unsettling. Today it's not the frank eroticism and deliberate blasphemy which disturb -- although "Les Bijoux," a chop-licking description of Baudelaire's mistress lolling around on a divan naked under her stage jewelry, remains remarkably hot and bothersome.
It's not the period elements that sting, but that vibrant underlying mania. Just test the potency of the following lines, an invocation to Death in "Le Voyage," the last poem in Fleurs du Maclass="underline"
"O Death, old captain, it is time! Lift anchor!
This land wearies us, o Death, let us set sail!
Even though sky and sea are black as ink,
Our hearts you know are filled with light!
Pour out your poison to strengthen us!
Our brains are so scorched with flame that we want
To plunge to the depths of the abyss, what matter if it be Hell or Heaven?
-- To the bottom of the Unknown to find something *new!*
For all his pop-star world-weary aesthetic posing -- Nadar describes Baudelaire as favoring excessively flared black jackets, red scarves, pink gloves and shoulder- length curling hair -- Baudelaire clearly *meant* this. He'll immolate himself, run any mad risk to break through consensus reality, to smash the ennui of civilization and all mortal limits in the slim hope of achieving some completely unknown form of ontological novelty. This is a junkie's rhetoric, but in an odd and menacing way quite timeless. It's a declaration one might take to heart today just before eating a double-handful of untested smart-drugs, and it could serve just as well as the rhetoric of some 22nd-century posthuman deliberately tweaking his own genetics. In some profound sense, it does not bode well for humanity that we are capable of producing a work like Fleurs du Mal.
"If rape, poison, the dagger, and arson have not yet embroidered their pleasing designs on the banal canvas of our wretched destinies, it's because (alas!) we lack the courage to act otherwise." Put it this way -- this is not the guy to trust with your car keys.
Immediately after Baudelaire's amazing portrait comes another extremely striking Nadar image. It's a studio nude of Christine Roux, a cafe singer and minor-league courtesan who ran in the Murger circle and was talked out of her clothes by Nadar in 1855. She also features as "Musette" in Murger's *Scenes de la Vie de Boheme,* in which she is the mistress of "Marcel," himself said to be based partially on Nadar. Christine stands in a conventional model's art-posture, weight on one leg, torso slightly twisted, but her face is hidden in the crook of her raised right elbow, rendering her effectively anonymous, a luscious icon for the male gaze.
Murger's fictional treatment of Musette is friendly and tolerant, but more than a little contemptuous. The fictional Musette is the standard hooker with a heart of gold; but Murger's indulgence doesn't hide the fact that the Paris Bohemia was a society that specialized in treating women as hired meat. Here's Nadar himself, a man of wide tolerance, a man of unquestionable psychological insight, describing Baudelaire's favorite mistress, the small-time actress and courtesan Jeanne Duvaclass="underline"
"A tall, almost too tall girl. A negress, or at least a mulatto: whole packets of ricepowder could not bleach the copper of the face, neck and hands. A beautiful creature in fact, of a special beauty which owed nothing to Phidias. A special dish for the ultrarefined palate. Beneath the impetuous luxuriance of her ink-black and curling mane, her eyes, large as soup-plates, seemed blacker still; her nose was small, delicate, the nostrils chiselled with exquisite delicacy; her mouth Egyptian.... the mouth of the Isis of Pompeii, with splendid teeth between prominent and beautifully designed lips. She looked serious, proud, even a bit disdainful. Her figure was long-waisted, graceful and undulating as a snake, and especially remarkable for the exuberant, exceptional development of the breasts. And this abundance, which was not without grace, gave her the look of a branch overloaded with ripe fruit."
Jeanne Duval's sexy as hell. She's a special dish, she's a soup-plate, she's a statue, she's a snake, she's a fruit tree; she's anything but a human being. This is the rhetoric one has to emit in order to treat women the way women were treated in Bohemian Paris. In FLOWERS OF EVIL, Baudelaire gloats over Jeanne Duval with a lipsmacking contempt that is truly painful to witness, declaring her a beast, a tramp, trash, carrion, and then wallowing in her at length. One can't help but conclude that Baudelaire would like Jeanne even better if her head were severed, although that might reduce the ugly satisfaction he takes in blaming her for the existence of his own libido.
Musette, her photo placed rather too aptly on page 69, is a poisoned dish. You have to buy her, and if you catch anything from her, it's as much as your life is worth. There's no birth control to speak of, so you may well end up supporting bastard children or, worse yet, not supporting them. There will be no meeting of minds here; it's true Musette can sing a bit, but to marry her would be an utter disaster, a mesalliance reducing you to a social laughing-stock. This is skin for money, with a nice brain-eating tang of Russian roulette tossed in for spice. And by the way, it's also a mortal sin, which is no small deal in mid-nineteenth century Catholic France.