The Portrait As Tete-a-Tete : A photo exhibit that will come West only between hard covers : NADAR, <i> By Maria Morris Hambourg, Francoise Heilbrun and Philippe Neagu (Metropolitan Museum of Art / Harry N. Abrams: $65; 308 pp.)</i>

Gaspard-Felix Tournachon would no doubt have been delighted by the attention paid him through a comprehensive exhibition of his work--first at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, then at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art--and the accompanying publication of a book both lavish and scholarly, called simply “Nadar,” the nickname that became his professional signature.

His was a lusty, self-aggrandizing personality. Ardent, impulsive, naively optimistic, Nadar (1820-1910), was a restless explorer of multiple fields. Abortively a medical student, he plunged into the checkered world of journalism as both caricaturist and writer, enjoyed la vie boheme , made friends with the gifted and famous, set himself up in business, dabbled in left-wing politics, and skirmished with aeronautic exploits (like Babar, he ascended in a giant balloon)--at all times energetically cultivating an appreciative audience.

Despite his extravagant efforts, posterity might blamelessly have forgotten him, except for the fact that in little over half a decade, starting in the mid-1850s, he created some of the most fascinating photographic portraits ever made. Words used by his friend and occasional subject, the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire, to describe the nature of a persuasive painted portrait, sum up Nadar’s achievement in an allied medium: “The efforts of the artist who has first seen what is evident but also guessed at what is hidden” result in “dramatized biography or rather the natural drama inherent in every man.”

Nadar did his great portrait work at a time when studio technique had developed sufficiently to allow the capture of fleeting moments and before the widespread commercialization--and artistic cheapening--of the genre. Taking as his subjects people he knew and others who aroused his curiosity or admiration, he used an intuitive, highly developed psychological insight to render them in two ways at once: as distinctive, “important” individuals and as creatures whose temperamental complexity makes any single view of them seem miraculous in its evanescent yet revelatory quality. The resulting pictures combine, oddly and felicitously, the imposing written-in-stone quality of monumental sculpture and the breathtaking volatility of springtime weather. Apparently it was Nadar’s method to engage his sitter in conversation while he shot and the portraits do, indeed, have the intimacy of tete-a-tete exchanges in their sheer physical presence and their indications of lively intellectual and emotional rapport.

Equal to Nadar’s understanding of human temperament was his mastery of light, the element that is to photography what water is to fish. Nadar modulates light so that it discloses and conceals with equal subtlety--and, seemingly, utter naturalness; you never notice the machinations of technique. Light, for him, is not merely a tool for rendering shape and texture; it’s his ally in conveying traits in human nature. His ability to give shadows relative degrees of transparency proves his skill in using the tangible metaphorically: The carefully calibrated range from clarity to obscurity in an individual portrait indicates which aspects of himself the person presents freely to the world, where his secret self lies, and the mysterious nature of the terrain in between.

Primarily a portraitist, Nadar ventured into other realms as well. Experimenting with electric light, he photographed the skeleton-strewn catacombs and the sewers of Paris; the results were mild and rather stilted. Apparently his art required the fluency of natural illumination, as well as living flesh and complex spirit. His enthusiasm for flight produced its share of pictures; they, too, are largely indifferent. With more telling results he examined a hermaphrodite; the stunner in this series is clinical and melodramatic at once--a picture in which Nadar the eloquent romantic and Nadar the one-time medical student fuse their unslakable thirst for the vagaries of human identity.

If you’re interested in Nadar (or photography or the late-Romantic sensibility) you need this book--for two obvious, though quite separate, reasons: the images and the text. Most buyers of heavily illustrated art books make the investment for the pictures; if the text, should they bother with it, turns out to be more than adequate, so much the better. In this case, along with nearly 100 full-page plates (the exhibition between covers, as it were) you get seven remarkably readable essays that offer everything you might want to know and then some.

The leading essay, by Maria Morris Hambourg, head of the photography department at the Metropolitan Museum, demonstrates her conspicuous intelligence, her diligent, thoughtful research, and her efficient writing style. She chronicles Nadar’s milieu, life and work, grounding the extraordinary photographs in concrete circumstances that make them seem almost--though not quite--inevitable, genius always guarding a portion of its secret. Francoise Heilbrun, Hambourg’s counterpart at the Musee d’Orsay, zeros in on the photographs as art. Her scrutiny is a devoted one and her perceptions full of insight. Deftly she marries aesthetics to scholarship by proposing stylistic examination as a method of divining which works are Nadar’s, which those of his difficult brother and sometime associate Adrien Tournachon, and which collaborations. Though no one will ever know for sure, the approach is illuminating. Sylvie Aubenas tackles the thankless job of discussing the leavings--Nadar’s photography outside the portrait genre--which she manages with grace and acumen.

Among the other contributors, Ulrich Keller relies on objective evidence to survey the evolution of Nadar’s work and address the tangled task of sorting out which of the photographs bearing the Nadar imprint can authentically be attributed to the artist. In the course of his investigation, Keller explains the business of successive generations of prints--a dry subject that he makes absorbing. The late Philippe Neagu has set Nadar’s work in the pictorial context of its time by examining Nadar’s own art criticism, while Andre Rouille interprets a souped-up memoir Nadar produced in his old age, further revealing the photographer as a unique personality yet very much a man of his era.

The reproductions, scrupulously made from the best sources available, are superb, though the original prints remain conspicuously more delicate, fugitive and texturally complex than any copy can indicate. This is final, ironic proof of Nadar’s contention that in photography (as elsewhere) technique is one thing, seizing the soul another--far more difficult and rare.