Michal Sapir
Cryptography in Artificial Light:
Poe's Stories and Nadar's Stills

NOTES

1
Williams mentions Victor Hugo's Les Misérables as a 

typical example for this kind of epistemological 

framework. In the novel the setting of crucial events in 

the Parisian sewers serves as a metaphor for the author's 

belief that the foundational truth of the visible facade of 

cultural and historical events lies in their obscure and 

hidden interiors (46-47). Hugo was a close friend and 

political ally of Nadar's; Les Misérables was published in 

1862, the same year Nadar first went underground.

2
A similar relinquishment of depth in favor of surface is 

described by Linda Nochlin in her essay on the 

representation of death in the second half of the 

nineteenth century. Following the "isolation of the fact of 

death from a context of transcendental significance or 

value" (64), artists concentrated on "the sheer 

phenomenology of dying" (60), because "the reduction of 

the vertical significance of death requires an expansion of 

its horizontal circumstantiality" (66).