Nadar, élevant la Photographie à la hauteur de l'Art (Nadar Elevating Photography to the Height of Art), from the series Souvenirs d'Artistes

While it seems that Daumier recognizes in this print the artistic potential of photography, he makes Nadar’s elevation of photography to the heights of art literal. This visual pun can be seen to undermine the seriousness of photography as an art form. <
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> The great French photographer Nadar (pseudonym for Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) was an aeronautics enthusiast and built an enormous hot air balloon from which to take the first-ever aerial photographs. Photography had been around since the 1820s with the pioneering work of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and his colleague Nicéphore Niépce, but early copperplate daguerreotypes required long exposure times and could not be reproduced. Advances in photographic techniques meant that by Nadar’s time, photographers had greater freedom in terms of when and where they worked. The medium presented greater expressive and artistic possibilities than ever before.