Catacombs, Paris

After achieving fame as a theater critic, caricaturist, and a portrait photographer of unparalleled talent, the ever-restless Nadar left the Grands Boulevards of Paris to rise above the city in a giant hot-air balloon and to go below its streets into the city’s sewers and catacombs. Beginning in the 18th century and continuing into the 1860s, cemeteries in central Paris were cleared for reasons of health and development, and the bones of the long-dead were transferred to abandoned underground quarries then outside the city limits. Even with artificial light, Nadar’s long exposures prompted him to people his pictures with a mannequin rather than an actual worker.