How Paul Nadar's Travel Photographs from the Karakum Desert Inspired Jules Verne
ORIENT | Culture. On June 11, the Museum of Fine Arts of Turkmenistan opened a photo exhibition, "Journey Through Turkmen Lands," featuring rare photographs taken by the French photographer Paul Nadar in 1890. More than just an artistic or archival exhibition, this exhibition is a visual exploration and anthropological document that captures the very fabric of life at a turning point in time.
Each of the photographs serves as a portal into the unified cultural space of Central Asia in the late 19th century—a period when the region was opening up to the world through the prism of technological progress, yet simultaneously preserving its deep civilizational identity. Through the lens of a French master, a living, pulsating reality gazes upon us: the genuine emotions of people, the grandeur of pristine landscapes, the dignity of the guardians of traditions, and the rhythm of a bygone way of life...
The exhibition vernissage took place yesterday, bringing together representatives of diplomatic missions, renowned cultural figures, journalists, and authoritative experts. Welcoming the first visitors, Philippe Merlin, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of France to Turkmenistan, emphasized that this project, realized thanks to multilateral support, opens a new chapter in the work of the French Institute in Ashgabat.
The head of the diplomatic mission introduced the evening's main guest, Svetlana Gorshenina, a renowned French historian and research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), whose research helped bring these images back from archival oblivion.
In turn, Nursakhet Shirimov, Deputy Minister of Culture of Turkmenistan, shifted the focus in his speech to the deep processes of cultural interaction. He noted that such projects form a strong horizontal fabric of mutual understanding between peoples, when a careful attitude toward shared heritage and respect for national history become the foundation for joint creative initiatives for the future.
When the official part concluded, the forty-five modest photographs on display literally came to life thanks to Svetlana Gorshenina's passionate narration. The atmosphere in the hall resembled an intellectual salon: the audience surrounded her in a living ring. When the microphone temporarily malfunctioned, people froze and hung on her every word, afraid to miss the subtlest details of the historical excursion.
Gorshenina lifted the curtain on a colossal array of data, as the forty-five photographs on display are just the tip of the iceberg, carefully selected from more than a thousand original negatives by Paul Nadar, taken in the "Turkmen lands" and preserved to this day in French archives. Her account transformed the exhibition into a true detective dive back to 1890, when the son of the legendary French photographer Félix Nadar set out on his famous journey along the newly constructed Trans-Caspian Railway.
The expedition's unique charm is given by the logistical details, which today seem like pages from an adventure novel. A special salon car was allocated for Paul Nadar's journey along the Trans-Caspian Railway, which for several months served as the French master's mobile residence. In this makeshift train, he traveled through the desert in the company of two close friends and an impressive arsenal of high-tech equipment for the time.
The availability of such an autonomous space was crucial to the success of the entire mission. In the extreme Central Asian heat and pervasive dust, Nadar needed to ensure the utmost safety of the delicate photographic materials. The train car served as a secure mobile storage facility: inside, the exposed glass plates and film rolls were carefully packed in light-proof containers, protecting them from the merciless sun. The train spent long periods at stations—Kyzylarvat, Ashgabat, Merv...
The railway track literally led the photographer by the hand: the train would stop, Nadar and his companions would step onto the platform or head to the local bazaar, capture fleeting moments of history with their lenses, and then return the precious negatives to the train car, which would carry them thousands of kilometers to the Paris laboratory on the Rue d'Anjou.
An attentive researcher will certainly notice an invisible thread linking Paul Nadar's name to Jules Verne's novel "Claudius Bombarnac," which describes the French reporter's journey along the Trans-Asian Railway. The book was published in 1893, three years after this expedition. Félix Nadar, Paul's father, was a close friend of Jules Verne, and when the younger Nadar returned to Paris from his 1890 tour, his fresh travel reports and the first-ever photographs of the newly laid rails in the Karakum Desert became a primary source of inspiration for the writer. The fictional Claudius Bombarnac in the novel sets out on a route that begins, like Paul Nadar's, in the port of Uzun-Ada on the Caspian Sea, and passes through Turkestan... to Beijing (at the time the novel was written, the Russian Trans-Caspian Railway did not reach Kokand).
Moreover, Jules Verne's regular illustrator, Léon Benett, who illustrated the first edition of Claudius Bombarnac in 1892, also never visited these parts. He created his famous engravings for the book, directly copying compositions, facial features, clothing details, and landscapes from Paul Nadar's original negatives. Of course, Nadar's expedition was no random tourist voyage.
The railway was not simply an engineering feat at the time, but a symbol of rapid modernization and the opening of the region to the rest of the world. Behind Nadar's journey lay the keen, calculating interest of French financial circles in the region's developing infrastructure. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Trans-Caspian Railway was seen by European capital as a strategic route to the richest raw materials markets of the East.
Paul Nadar himself, in this context, was far from an idle observer: he combined the traits of a refined artist and an exceptionally successful, shrewd businessman. As the head of a thriving Parisian photography studio and the official representative of the innovative American company Eastman Kodak in France, Nadar was well aware of the marketing potential of his trip.
His progress along the new highway to the First International Exhibition in Tashkent was a carefully calculated business mission. Nadar was going to demonstrate the technological superiority of the European photography industry, test equipment in extreme conditions, and, in effect, pave the way for future Eurasian economic projects, clearly demonstrating that progress and art always go hand in hand.
Paul Nadar carried with him the technological revolution of his time—a portable Kodak camera with Eastman roll film, which eliminated the need for bulky tripods and glass plates. He also carried a special "tropical" version of it—the Nadar Express—a camera assembled from particularly durable wood and protected from Central Asian dust, dryness and heat.
This camera was Nadar Jr.'s engineering pride—he won a gold medal for its development at the 1889 Paris World's Fair. Its main feature was its removable magazine (cassette). Unlike early Kodak models, which were designed exclusively for roll film, Nadar's camera allowed the photographer to use both classic glass plates and flexible Eastman celluloid roll film.
This versatility allowed Nadar to instantly change tactics in the field: he used large-format glass plates for static subjects—for example, the majestic architecture of Merv. This required a tripod but guaranteed exemplary detail. He loaded roll film when he needed to work dynamically, capturing fleeting street scenes, the movement of caravans, and faces in crowds. It was precisely this technical freedom that allowed the French master to capture what virtually no one had captured before him: the living, pulsating, unified cultural space of Central Asia at the end of the nineteenth century.
His photographs demonstrate that Nadar consciously avoided artificial exoticization of the East. His lens captured the genuine emotions of local residents, the dynamism of vibrant bazaars, the dignity of Turkmen horsemen and falconers, and the endless, captivating grace of sandy landscapes.
The value of this visual archive is largely due to Paul Nadar's profound understanding of the importance of ethnographic accuracy. While working on his portrait series, the French master didn't simply capture random shots but consciously sought to capture material culture. Svetlana Gorshenina points out a remarkable detail of his fieldwork: when creating portraits of local residents, and especially Turkmen women, Nadar asked them to dress as elegantly as possible for the photo shoot, taking their best festive attire and massive silver jewelry from their family chests.
A born researcher, Nadar intuitively sensed that in traditional Central Asian society, jewelry and costume were a complex visual code, conveying status, clan affiliation, and the sacred traditions of the people. Collected in a single frame, these elements transformed each photograph from a simple family portrait into a priceless, detailed ethnographic document, preserving for posterity the cultural identity of the Turkmen land at the turn of the century.
...Walking among the exhibits and gazing at the frozen faces of the 19th century, many visitors to the exhibition couldn't help but share similar thoughts. "How did they live back then?!" some exclaimed in amazement, observing the colorful street scenes. "Without cell phone service, without instant messaging, without internet?"
The answer to this sincere question from a person in the digital age, perhaps, lies in the very nature of old photography. People of 1890 weren't isolated at all—their "world wide web" was simply tangible physical space itself, and instead of gigabytes of virtual noise, they possessed the priceless luxury of indivisible time. The screenless era didn't narrow their world; it deepened it. Rather than waste themselves on hundreds of minute-by-minute notifications, they lived their lives with absolute inner concentration, fully present in the moment—be it a leisurely conversation in a teahouse or a piercing gaze into the lens of a quaint French camera.
Paul Nadar captured more than just ethnographic types; he captured a state of mind devoid of fuss. And looking at these photographs today, one catches a paradoxical thought: perhaps it was precisely the absence of the internet that allowed them to see reality in all its pristine, unfiltered clarity. They did not broadcast their lives externally; they felt them deeply, preserving that inner integrity of perception that a person overloaded with technology in the twenty-first century so desperately longs for.
Looking at these faces through the lens of historical research, one realizes that Nadar's exhibition manifests the very permeability and openness of cultures that existed in the region before the era of rigid geopolitical divisions. Each photograph serves as visual evidence that Central Asia was never an isolated periphery—it was a distinctive intellectual and civilizational center.
And today, as the world seeks a cure for its trust deficit, these black-and-white images from 1890 serve as a reliable bridge for cultural dialogue. They remind us that Eurasian integration is founded not only on economic pragmatism, but also on a deep civilizational code that, through the centuries, continues to nourish our shared ability to hear and understand one another.
Victoria Shchupak
