Portraying the Age of Individualism : Art review: New York’s ‘Nadar’ exhibition shows an artist whose rapport with his subjects set him apart from other portrait photographers of the day.

In the great “Nadar” exhibition currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 15 photographs of Pierrot, the classic pantomime clown descendant from the commedia dell’arte, are being shown for the first time since they were made 140 years ago.

Together, they offer an unusually compelling introduction to the brief but trenchant career of one of the first great portrait photographers.

Nadar--the pen name used by Gaspard-Felix Tournachon (1820-1910)--was in his youth a politically active denizen of bohemian Paris, back when la boheme described an actual way of life rather than a nostalgic code for charming poverty entwined with artistic rapture. As limned by Met curator Maria Morris Hambourg in the show’s indispensable and unusually readable catalogue, the writer, caricaturist and all-around rabble-rouser was a guy I’d like to have known.

Committed to the ideals of the liberal Republican left during a tumultuous era of French political life, Nadar was instrumental in shaping a newly emergent idea of the modern individual.

Tournachon’s adoption of a pen name was symptomatic of his urge to reinvent himself--on his own terms--while his stories, satirical drawings and camera images put art at the center of that process.

Nadar was principally active as a photographer only for a brief period, between 1854 and 1865. Photography had been invented just 15 years before and pictures soon became a public fad. Nadar’s practice was one of those serendipitous convergences between an artist and a moment that can conspire to produce something extraordinary.

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Like just about everybody, he began as an amateur. He learned basic technique on the side, after having set up his ne’er-do-well younger brother, Adrien, in the photographic portrait business. Adrien would fail in this endeavor, as in many others, while remaining a thorn in Felix’s side throughout his life.

To publicize their new commercial endeavor, Nadar asked his friend, the popular mime Charles Deburau, to pose for a series of photographs made collaboratively with Adrien. The images were shown at the firm’s exhibition space at the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris, where they promptly won a gold medal.

The prints shown at the fair were lost, but an album recently given to the Musee d’Orsay in Paris (co-organizer of this first-ever Nadar survey) made their current exhibition possible.

The 15 photographs of Pierrot show the tall, narrow-faced mime in a variety of poses. He is running, imploring, laughing, listening, pained and surprised.

The trickster is dressed in the traditional garb of a voluminous white-muslin smock and baggy trousers. Following the precedent of his late father, Baptiste--regarded by those who know about such things as the greatest mime of all time--Charles wore no frilly ruff around his neck; replaced the conventional broad-brimmed white hat with a black, tightly fitted skullcap.

This Pierrot was a sleeker, more urban and thus more modern buffoon than his predecessors. And in his multiple poses, enacted before a blank and evenly lit backdrop, the silently gesticulating figure seems to have embodied the very problem of the new and burgeoning genre of portrait photography.

To have a portrait taken was a highly theatrical procedure, a performance in which the sitter was something like an actor, and the photographer not unlike a director. The studio was their stage and the communicative voice was pictorial, not verbal. A passively discerning audience would need to read the sitter’s expressive face and subtle gestures that established the genre as a kind of photographic pantomime.

The theatrical power of that encounter can be seen in Nadar’s astonishingly beautiful 1864 portraits of the young actress Sarah Bernhardt; but it is present in all his finest portraits, whether or not the subject is directly related to the theater. (Sixty-seven other portraits are on view, along with medical images and pictures taken in the Parisian catacombs and sewers.)

The Met’s curator proposes a convincing explanation for the photographer’s distinctive pictures, which are markedly different from the usually stiff and formal portraits made by many others. Nadar, Hambourg writes, had an unusual rapport with his sitters.

Many were his friends--illustrator Gustave Dore; critic and writer Charles Baudelaire; his surrogate father, Charles Philipon--but even if they were strangers (like Sarah Bernhardt), the photographer took care to develop a casual intimacy with his subjects before he opened the shutter. That intimacy is what we read in his pictures.

They portray a gregarious sociability among expressive individuals that is both new in the history of portraiture and a sign of the artist’s radical commitment to social equality. Photographic pantomime could be a great leveler in ways difficult for painting.

The Pierrot photographs are, remember, publicity stills meant to tout the Tournachon Brothers’ business. Perhaps the most complex of them is the picture of the clown as a photographer himself. The full-length frontal image shows his right hand pulling a plate holder from the rear of the boxy camera, while his left hand gestures to an unseen sitter to look into the camera’s lens.

The “sitter,” of course, corresponds to the photographer (Nadar) who took the picture at which we look and, by extension, to the viewers (us) who now peruse it. Both are directed by the mime to look into the lens. The white-faced clown cleverly reflects the unseen artist while imploring the unknown audience, uniting all three in the photographic act.

Clowns have a long history as surrogates for the artist in society. Once he was the tragicomic court jester, whose job was to ridicule the very institutions that supported him. Nadar’s portraits of Pierrot record a significant change, which was also evident in the theatrical work of Baptiste and Charles Deburau.

Now, the joker is a modern, urban Everyman. In a startling transaction made possible by photography, the artist, the art and the audience assume a state of equipoise. Nadar’s portraits are extraordinary because they established photography as a new and disruptive field where individuals could gather to speak in a communal conversation.

* Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., New York, (212) 535-7710, through July 9. Closed Mondays.