A recent biography begins Who doesn´t know Nadar? In France, that´s a rhetorical question. Of all of the legendary figures who emerged from mid-19th-century Paris--a cohort that includes Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Gustave Courbet, and Alexandre Dumas--Nadar may be the most innovative, the most restless, the most modern. The first great portrait photographer, a pioneering balloonist, the first person to take an aerial photograph, and the first to launch an airmail service, Nadar was one of the first celebrity artist-entrepreneurs. A kind of 19th-century Andy Warhol, he knew everyone worth knowing and photographed them all, leaving for posterity psychologically compelling portraits of Manet, Sarah Bernhardt, Delacroix, Daumier, and countless others--a priceless panorama of Parisian celebrity. Born Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, he adopted the pseudonym Nadar as a young bohemian, when he was a budding writer and cartoonist. Later he would install the name Nadar on the façade of his opulent photographic studio in giant script, the illuminated letters ten feet tall, the whole sign fifty feet long. Nadar became known to all of Europe and even across the Atlantic after he launched The Giant, a hot-air balloon as tall as a 12-story building, the largest of its time. His ballooning exploits, which include a catastrophic crash that made headlines around the world, inspired his friend Jules Verne to create one of his most dynamic heroes. The Great Nadar illuminates a larger-than-life figure, a visionary whose outsize talent and canny self-promotion put him ahead of his time.