Conclusions

The lives and work of Disdéri, Marville, and Nadar are revolutionary because their work represents new forms of interaction between art and politics. The fact that these men were taking such different kinds of photos during a period in which Paris underwent so many physical and social changes illustrates how diverse the art became a decade after its invention.  It was, as some might say, the new medium through which these photographers brought to light varying degrees of consciousness.
More specifically, these photographers and their work can be viewed as illustrating a new political consciousness in art.  By consciousness, I mean: being aware of one’s own existence, sensations, thoughts, and surroundings.  This consciousness can be individual or collective.  The moment of ‘awakening’ is comparable to the Nineteenth-century literary phenomenon called synesthesia.  One of Nada’rs subjects, Baudelaire, proposed synesthesia as a new form of nature, a crossing of the sense, and thus a new awakening.
History supplies us with various examples of what one can call synesthestic “awakenings.” There have artistic and social awakenings, such as a class consciousness, a black consciousness, and even an acid consciousness in the 1960s.  I propose that Disdéri, Marville and Nadar established different forms of consciousness in their photography. Their art by intent or unknowingly challenged levels of consciousness and in doing so, photographers after them discovered ‘new’ ways to approach their art.  That said, when one considers their photographs alone we can see different forms of consciousnesses emerge from their work.
More than his contemporaries, Disdéri is known to have profited from a mutually beneficial relationship with the Second Empire. As I have discusses so far, knowledge of his life suggests that he was fully conscious of personal goals and of his photographic business practices, even if this fact does not explain Disdéri’s personal politics.  Here, the private life of Disdéri is harder to asses except if one interprets his photographs as his personal forms of expression. In particular, the souvenir-type photographs he produced impress the viewer for the consciousness of memory they conjure up.  Was Disdéri aware of their potential impact?  Did he realize these photos would act like souvenirs and promote the collective memory of Napoleon III’s leadership?  It can be said that like postcards, Disdéri’s images encapsulate an era in Parisian history is inscribed in the collective conscience, and in the minds of new generations, a new kind of ‘recognition’ of past leaders.
Where Disdéri could be aware of the power of photographs to shape a nation’s heroes, Marville’s work appears caught between two extremes.  His life reminds us of the instances in which little voices of dissidence whisper is one’s consciousness and produce inklings that enlighten the spirit, even if the necessity to work, eat and survive overrides these thoughts.  Marville’s photographs illustrate his own contradictions insofar as he was known for his socialist leanings and yet his photographic work for the Second Empire makes no obvious attempt to reflect his political beliefs. Marvill’es photographs bring to light how an unrestrained creativity despite that their subject matter is often architechural. The architectural photographs of street scenes and buildings evoke many emotions; they magically breathe life into neighborhoods and exude elements of a certain Parisian character.  In addition, his photographs document a sense of place; one can ‘feel’ different sides of Paris. In some photos, Marville records a morphing Parisian identity as he depicts the ‘old’ and the ‘modernized,’ an enhanced, new visual definition of Paris.  Even as he worked independently from his political beliefs, Marvill’es photographs do create a distinct awareness of of Paris, as a city, capital, and home.  Perhaps his own identity could be felt through this lens.
Finally, Nadar stands out as the artist who embodies a complete or constant consciousness, since his personal views overflowed into and matched those of the public realm. To be sure, his very lifestyle was a reflection of his political beliefs.  During Napoleon III’s reign, Nadar found alternative ways of making money that did not compromise his beliefs.  Nadar’s work, expressed through his complete consciousness, challenges the viewer to experience new ways of seeing the world.  Nadar channeled his political consciousness into his photographs, and the photographs in turn raise the viewer’s awareness.  His photographs comprised predominately of his socialist peers and do not clearly illustrate the fact that he lived under an oppressive Empire and dared not to conform to its demands. The artists Nadar photographs – Sand, Pierrot, Baudelaire – evoke Nadar’s synesthetic awareness of social and internal changes already prevalent in literature of the time.  Besides that the ethereal nature of his balloon shots and those of the city seem to capture the ambivalence Nadar and others felt in seeing the impact of Haussmann’s changes on Paris, and the psychological effects they might had had on artists who saw these forms of modernization as detrimental to the individual’s unique identity and poetic spirit of the past.
To this end, one can say that these three photographers engage the idea of a new politically-photographic consciousness.  After all, it is through their artistic experiments, self-exploration, and life choices that we can not only visualize the political spectrum of the 1850s but we can see how these artists chose to represent their city and how the city transforms in their art. Did Disdéri, Marville and Nadar infuse their art with individual levels of consciousness?  I would argue that the photographs selected for this project indeed reflect the qualities or ideas of the men who created them. To me, the striking quality of the photographs I chose is the variety of ideas produced within a focus on architecture or portraits.  Surely we can analyze portraits of Napoleon III or Charles Baudelaire for the political and literary influence they had on the Second Empire and we can  focus on how each portrait visually contributed to the subject’s personal legacy since 1850.  Likewise, we can study Marville’s architectural photographs in an effort to document the effects of modernization, or we could study how these photographs represent for many people today a brand of nostalgia for an ‘Old Paris’ which subsequently inspired other photographers such as the well-known Eugène Atget to redefine and  ‘capture’ the spirit and legacies of Paris.