Nadar, whose real name was Felix Tournachon (1820-1910), was a conspicuous, even astonishing presence in nineteenth-century France. Engaging and quick-witted, he invented himself over and over as a bohemian writer, a journalist, a romantic utopian, a caricaturist, a portrait photographer, a balloonist, an entrepreneur, a prophet of aeronautics. The name "Nadar" was on everyone's lips. Today, it is Nadar's photography that is remembered. His sitters,...

An "evanescent shadow, a delicate, just perceptible image, the trace of a small plant on a field of periwinkle blue." With this description of one of the very earliest photographic experiments, Maria Morris Hambourg begins the riveting story of photography's first century, a story that concludes on the eve of World War II with the dramatic photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and Walker Evans, images imprinted indelibly into the consciousness...