Today it's routine to take photos from an airplane window, use a camera underwater, watch a movie, or view an X-ray. But the photographic innovations more than a century ago that made such things possible were experimental, revelatory, and sometimes dangerous--and many of the innovators, entrepreneurs, and inventors behind them were memorable eccentrics. In Flashes of Brilliance, writer and photo editor Anika Burgess engagingly blends art, science, and social history to reveal the most dramatic developments in photography from its birth in the 1830s to the early twentieth century.
Writing with verve and an eye for compelling details, Burgess explores how photographers uncovered new vistas, including catacombs, cities at night, the depths of the ocean, and the surface of the moon. She describes how photographers captured the world as never seen before, showing for the first time the bones of humans, the motion of animals, the cells of plants, and the structure of snowflakes. She takes us on a tour of astonishing innovations, including botanist Anna Atkins and her extraordinary blue-hued cyanotypes and the world's first photobook; Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey's famed experiments in capturing motion and their long legacy; large format photography and photographs so small as to be invisible to the naked eye; and aerial photography using balloons, kites, pigeons, and rockets. Burgess also delves into the early connections between photography and society that are still with us today: how photo manipulation--the art of "fake images"--was an issue right from the start; how the police used the telephoto lens to surveil suffragists; and how leading Black figures like Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass adapted self-portraits to assert their identity and autonomy.
Richly illustrated and filled with fascinating tales, Flashes of Brilliance shows how the rise of a new art form transformed culture and our view of the world.
Review Quotes:
A fascinating immersion among the obsessive rogues, daring experimenters, and fearless pioneers who risked life and limb to bring photography to life. Anika Burgess's astonishing history dives into the phenomenal photographic breakthroughs that changed our world--and how we see it. You'll never look at a snapshot the same way again.--Bianca Bosker, New York Times best-selling author of Get the Picture
An entertaining, insightful, and informative romp through photography's early days. Anika Burgess conveys well how the pioneers were by turns inventive, foolhardy, ruggedly stubborn, and visionary. As one who is knowledgeable on the subject, it was delightful for me to learn much that I didn't know.--Tom Ang, author of Photography: The Definitive Visual History
Cleverly weaving together photography, art, and science, Anika Burgess reveals not only the challenges that made early photographs look the way they do but also the excitement, uncertainty, creativity, and even the danger of working at the frontiers of visual technology. Beautifully written, like a great work of fiction--except, incredibly, it's all true.--Phillip Prodger, author of An Alternative History of Photography
Anika Burgess has not only an eye for overlooked images but also an ear for the unusual characters and distinctive voices that narrated this history as it unfolded in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her enthusiasm for photography's surprising stories, and her occasional wry aside from the shores of the twenty-first century, is infectious.--Kim Beil, author of Good Pictures: A History of Popular Photography
A scintillating history that'll have you looking at photography in a new light.--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
[A] captivating whirlwind tour. ... Full of colorful details about the ingenuity of early photographers ... [ Flashes of Brilliance] is a thrilling history of a medium and its seismic impact.-- "Publishers Weekly"
[E]legantly written ... [ Flashes of Brilliance] is also a lot of fun. ... Through painstaking research and her obvious love of the medium, Burgess succeeds in reminding us how special this 'small miracle of chemistry, optics, and light' really is.--Michael Patrick Brady "Washington Post"
Anika Burgess is a photo editor and writer whose work has been published in the New York Times and Atlas Obscura. She lives in New York.
W. W. Norton & Company
Pub Date: July 08, 2025
1.3" H x 9.1" L x 6.3" W
336 Pages
Hardcover