Culture January 1, 1

In nineteenth-century Paris, Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, who went by the pseudonym Nadar, took photographic portraits of everyone he knew. It’s quite a crowd: There are the illustrators Honoré Daumier and Gustave Doré; the painters Eugène Delacroix and Jean-François Millet; the composers Hector Berlioz and Gioachino Rossini; and the writers Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, and Charles Baudelaire. The standard Nadar shot is a three-quarter view, lit naturally from the left and a little above, with a plain mid-toned background and a sitter in dark clothes. If that sounds dull, a parade of his best work is anything but. His portraits are stark