Figures and Portraits, published by 5 Continents Editions in 2006, considers photographic portraiture between 1850 and 1914 through works from the Musée d’Orsay collection. Its subject is not limited to the celebrated face. Commissioned studio portraits, cartes de visite, images of prominent public figures, and more intimate amateur photographs together describe a period in which photography became an increasingly adaptable means of recording identity, status, memory, and personal presence.

The book’s interest lies in this breadth of photographic situations. Formal commissions and small-format social images sit alongside photographs whose value is more private, allowing the portrait to be read both as a public convention and as an instrument of everyday remembrance. The selection also places different kinds of photographic address in relation to one another: the composed studio pose, the circulated likeness, and the image made within a less institutional setting. Rather than reducing the history of the period to a single style or practitioner, the collection presents portraiture as a varied cultural practice.

Félix Nadar is identified as a photographer associated with the volume, while Françoise Heilbrun is credited as its author; the book should therefore be understood as an authored examination of a broader museum collection, not as a monograph exclusively devoted to one photographer. That distinction matters to readers interested in nineteenth-century photographic culture, where the social function of the portrait is inseparable from its visual form. Nadar’s presence gives the book a significant point of reference, but the wider selection is what establishes its comparative scope.

The 2006 English edition is a concise 96-page softcover measuring 16 × 16 cm. For collectors, its appeal rests in the focused historical interval, the institutional provenance of the material, and the way it brings canonical and intimate forms of portraiture into one compact study. It offers a clear entry into the Musée d’Orsay’s photographic holdings while preserving the plurality that makes early portrait photography so revealing.