Volume 42, Number 9 · May 25, 1995
Nadar's Swift Tact
By John Updike
Nadar 14-July 9, 1995
an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April
Nadar
catalog of the exhibition by Maria Morris Hambourg, by Françoise Heilbrun, by Philippe Néagu, with contributions by Sylvie Aubenas, by André Jammes, by Ulrich Keller, by Sophie Rochard, by André Rouillé
Metropolitan Museum of Art / Abrams, 272 pp., $60.00; $40.00 (paper)
Photography is a matter of time. The time of exposure is part of a photograph's credentials, and from even mediocre photographs flows the uncanny power of temporal authenticity: things looked this way at one certain moment in the past, a moment now irrevocably gone. Painting, for all its documentary value, has little such power, only an idealizing Platonic strength: the heroic age of American politics ended when, beginning with William Henry Harrison and John Tyler, presidents could be photographed, in all their warty imperviousness to the glamorization of brush strokes. We trust the camera—mechanical, dispassionate, mindless—but not the painter, who inevitably has some kind of myopia or an axe to grind.
Review, 2261 words
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