In 1858, French photographer and aeronaut Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) took the first successful aerial photographs from a balloon over Paris, pioneering both aerial photography and photojournalism. His technical achievements in stabilizing cameras and managing exposure times at altitude opened new possibilities for documentation and artistic expression from aerial perspectives.

Nadar's aerial photographs profoundly influenced literary descriptions of urban landscapes, providing writers with new visual models for depicting cities from above. Baudelaire and other French poets engaged with Nadar's work, while the combination of photography and ballooning inspired modernist experiments in perspective and fragmentation that would shape 20th-century literary techniques.