In Flashes of Brilliance, the photo editor traces the evolution of photography from the mid-19th to the early 20th century.
What made you want to write this book?
As a photo editor, I’ve always been fascinated by the history of photography. I came across a photo of a diver taken underwater in the 1890s, and it was just transporting. Firstly, aesthetically I loved it. But secondly, I couldn’t believe someone could take a photo underwater in the 1890s. And so I started to research and learned how it all happened. And that got me thinking about other genres in photography that seem to be contemporary but actually have their origins in the 19th century. It turns out it’s basically all of them—street photography, candid photography, even the medical before-and-after portrait.
How did you fit all these developments together?
One of the crucial things that helped it coalesce for me was breaking them into three parts: the first part is bringing the camera into new realms, whether it’s the air or underwater or underground, and also toward the moon. The middle section was really more about changes to photography itself, and specifically the format—microscopic photographs were helpful if you were transmitting, for example, sexually explicit content. And then the final section, this idea of photography making the invisible visible—the idea of capturing motion, capturing invisible worlds through a microscope, and of course, X-rays. One of the key things I wanted to convey is if there is a preconception of 19th-century photography, it’s that it’s not very vibrant, and that is actually very untrue. Showing this spectrum of some very dangerous activities, some thoughtful, some artistic, would be a way to dispute this idea.
You write about all sorts of crazy stunts photographers performed to get their shots.
In the early days, a man went to take some landscape photographs, carrying something like 120 pounds of equipment—just to take a shot of a hillside. Photography is, in a way, sort of a miracle. You can put the components together of chemicals and light, and you permanently freeze a moment in time and look at it and keep it with you. It’s very appealing.
What do modern readers have to learn from the story of early photography?
I think some issues that arise in the book will feel very contemporary. The chapter on candid photography describes how surreptitious photographs being taken—for example, spy photos taken of suffragists—raised issues of consent and surveillance. That issue is still something that we talk a lot about today. The same goes for photo manipulation, for that matter. That was there from almost the beginning.
