1868Paris
Aerial view of Paris — Place de l’Étoile
Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon), from Henri Giffard’s tethered balloon.
True aerial photograph
1868·Paris
Aerial view of Paris — Place de l’Étoile
Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon), from Henri Giffard’s tethered balloon.
True aerial photograph
What this plate shows
A camera in a balloon. The Arc de Triomphe sits in the star of new avenues Haussmann cut from the Étoile. Rooftops and roadbeds are seen from above, not imagined from above. BnF preserves a plate of eight views Nadar took from this tethered balloon in 1868. This is a true aerial photograph — the first surviving generation of Paris from the air.
- Image type
- True aerial photograph
- Source
- Brown University Library; Wikimedia Commons file of the 1868 balloon exposure.
- License
- Public domain (Nadar died 1910; published nineteenth century).
Same city, two kinds
Nadar’s balloon plate of the Étoile beside Marville’s street record of a boulevard being cut. Overview is not demolition. Both are photographs.