In Le Rêve d'un curieux , Philippe Ortel sees the poet face to face with death, the duel taking the form of a posing session with a photographer. The disappointment of death is expressed through the disappointment of the poet photographed. This sonnet describes the metaphysical ennui of this immortal subject, after the death of God. But beyond this reading, the whole of modern life takes on the dimension of this indefinite death.
This poem was written at the same time as Peintre de la vie moderne , although the latter was not a photographer, but a news cartoonist, an activity that photography would soon render obsolete. Here again, Baudelaire's choice is paradoxical, but the whole text could be read as an extension of the 1859 Salon, as a treatise on anti-photography, for example: "[...] in the execution of M. G. s execution show two things: one, a resurrectionist, evocative restraint of memory, a memory that says to everything: 'Lazarus, get up!'; the other, a fire, an intoxication of pencil, of brush, almost resembling a fury." Baudelaire would also contrast Guys with Nadar; the pencil and brush of the painter of modern life rival the sun of the photographer. In a way, it's a struggle between the work of memory and the instantaneous. Against the immediacy of photography, Baudelaire opposes the resurrection of painting. The essayist thus associates photography with modern decadence, and at the same time revalues techniques that have rapidly become archaic, in his rejection of photography; this is notably the case of the kaleidoscope, which features prominently in Le Peintre de la vie moderne, the phenakisticope in Morale du joujou, or the phantasmagoria of La Soupe et les Nuages.
And yet, despite this mistrust, Baudelaire wrote to his mother that he "would like to have [his] portrait". There was also a desire for photography (this is, incidentally, one of the last long, beautiful and intimate letters to his mother). Baudelaire mentions a good photographer from Le Havre, without naming him. One might think of Warnod, who was exhibited at the Salon de la Photographie, and whom Baudelaire might have met on that occasion.
Despite all his reservations, Baudelaire posed for Nadar, then for Carjat and Neyt, again with ambivalence, but also complacency: he didn't refuse to be photographed (by chance of a photographer friend, the most media-savvy); as a result, we possess a not inconsiderable, even significant number of photographs of him. The photographed subject is partly the author of the photo, through the pose, through the photogenic quality; there is thus a form of malign complicity. From the fourteen photographs of Baudelaire that have been found, we can see that the poet was photogenic, and this is also one of the aspects of his modernity.
Ultimately, however, it was probably photography's immobility that provoked Baudelaire's strongest resistance to this new medium. If he "hates the movement that moves lines", Baudelaire loves movement in his worship of images. We can also better understand Nadar's three-quarter portrait, blurred, unsuccessful, unsubmissive to the pose, in which Baudelaire moved, resisting photography and, above all, immobility.
