There is no such thing as an artistic photographer. Like everywhere else, in photography there are people who know how to see, and others who don’t even know how to look… Like in all trades, there are merchants and men with a conscience.

—Nadar

Photographic theory can be learned in an hour; the basic notions of photographic practice, in a day... I shall tell you what can’t be learned: a feel for light, an artistic appreciation of the effects produced by varied, combined sources of light...

—Nadar

What can [not] be learned … is the moral intelligence of your subject; it’s the swift tact that puts you in communion with the model, makes you size him up, grasp his habits and ideas in accordance with his character, and allows you to render, not an indifferent plastic reproduction that could be made by the lowliest laboratory worker, commonplace and accidental, but the resemblance that is most familiar and most favorable, the intimate resemblance. It’s the psychological side of photography—the word doesn’t seem overly ambitious to me.

—Nadar

If God had put a race of Nadars on the Earth, the sky would already have been scaled. Nadar, what a noisy name for both the eyes and the ears! It is everywhere, it resounds everywhere!

—Nadar