Flashes of Brilliance: The Genius of Early Photography and How It Transformed Art, Science, and History

Freelance photo editor Burgess debuts with a captivating whirlwind tour of photography’s early years. Spanning from the mid-19th to the early 20th century, Burgess’s history details how photography opened up vistas large and small, as scientists developed techniques to photograph the sea floor, the moon, and (in microscopic detail) snowflakes, and facilitated new ways of transmitting information (René Dagron’s “microphotographs”—which could be reduced to such miniscule proportions that an approximately 2-inch x 3-inch film might contain 3,000 images—proved helpful for military communications). Photography also illuminated the human body in novel ways, as Wilhelm Röntgen’s 1896 invention of the X-ray helped doctors make diagnoses and, not long after, allowed regular folks to take their own X-rays with do-it-yourself kits (before the harms of radiation exposure were discovered). Throughout, Burgess reveals how these developments shaped culture, noting, for example, that the invention of handheld cameras in the late 19th century allowed amateurs to snap photos of unsuspecting subjects (to whom they sometimes then tried to sell the negatives), paving the way for paparazzi and kicking off debates about privacy and consent that remain relevant today. Full of colorful details about the ingenuity of early photographers (some lugged around 75-pound cameras or hopped into hot-air balloons to get the perfect shot), this is a thrilling history of a medium and its seismic impact. (July)