Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (1820-1910) led many lives, sometimes in succession, sometimes all at once. A journalist and novelist, his name was constantly before the public, but it was his work as a caricaturist that made possible a blossoming of his personality. His stint as a daredevil aeronaut only increased his fame. Tournachon encouraged his younger brother Adrien to take up photography, paying Gustave Le Gray for instruction, and in the process was himself intrigued by the new art. Increasingly in debt, in 1854, and having already experimented with photography, he began to assist in Adrien's failing atelier. The wet collodion negative process had reduced exposure times to fractions of a second, creating the opportunity to capture candid portraits with the blink of the shutter. Nadar's Bohemian contacts in Paris provided an endless flow of fascinating subjects. Portrait photography became his life. In 1856, he successfully sued his younger brother for exclusive rights to the name Nadar. In 1862, Nadar made his series of photographs of the Paris catacombs. This series of pictures was the first to be made underground. Both his catacombs and sewers series are among the most striking images obtained using the then new technology of artificial lighting.