Inventing Nadar: A History of Photographic Firsts

Félix Nadar took the first aerial photograph in 1858, so the story goes. The evidence, Emily Doucet notes, is mixed. In Inventing Nadar, Doucet analyzes the historical and material production of the nineteenth-century Parisian photographer’s famous and numerous photographic firsts. Focusing on these oft-labeled groundbreaking elements of his career, she deconstructs Nadar’s legacy as a prime protagonist in the history of photography by interrogating the media techniques used to construct his invention narratives. Doucet highlights this highly mediated process as one that canonized novel applications of photography as discrete techniques with single authors and inventors. Looking to this process of mediation through the institutions and individuals that shaped Nadar’s archives, Doucet unpacks assumptions of Nadar as a master of early photography and shows how the medium is enmeshed in larger histories of media, science, and technology. The result is both a new account of Nadar’s place in photographic history and a critical study of how stories of innovation take shape.

Emily Doucet, PhD is a writer, editor and researcher interested in photography and the cultural life of technology – past, present, and future. She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Toronto. She has held research residencies and fellowships at the British Library, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Image Centre, and the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen, among others. Her work has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Leonard A. Lauder Center for Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Northrop Frye Centre at Victoria College. Her first book, Inventing Nadar: A History of Photographic Firsts, is forthcoming from Duke University Press in April 2026.

Zoë Tousignant is Curator, Photography, at the McCord Stewart Museum. She holds a PhD in Art History from Concordia University and an MA in Museum Studies from the University of Leeds, UK. Her research focuses on the production and reception of photographic culture in Quebec and Canada. Her curatorial projects have included close collaborations with such photographers as Serge Clément, Carlos Ferrand, Marisa Portolese, Gabor Szilasi and the members of the Disraeli collective. Her many publications include the books Gabor Szilasi: The Art World in Montreal, 1960-1980 (McCord Stewart Museum and McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019) and Pounding the Pavement: Montreal Street Photography (McCord Stewart Museum, 2025).