In the memoir he published in 1900, at the end of a very long life, Nadar reports that Balzac had a similar “vague dread” of being photographed. His explanation, according to Nadar, was that every body in its natural state was made up of a series of ghostly images superimposed in layers to infinity, wrapped in infinitesimal films … . Man never having been able to create, that is to make something material from an apparition, from something impalpable, or to make from nothing, an object—each Daguerreian operation was therefore going to lay hold of, detach, and use up one of the layers of the
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