A Review of “Flashes of Brilliance”
by Frank Gallagher
The development of photography, as a technology and an art form, is a story populated with a cast of colorful characters and unusual inventions. That’s what Anika Burgess explores in “Flashes of Brilliance: The Genius of Early Photography and how It Transformed Art, Science, and History,” published earlier this year by W.W. Norton.
Burgess, a freelance photo editor and writer, investigates three main themes:
- How photography “revealed unexpected viewpoints,” from high above the ground in a balloon to deep beneath the waves;
- Experiments in scale, composites, and other manipulations of images; and
- “Making the invisible visible,” delving into X-rays, microphotography and psychic photography.
If you’ve ever been curious about the early days of photography, this book is a good read. It’s full of stories of persistence in the face of danger and failure, of experiments with (at the time) no practical value, of early glimpses of things we now take for granted. You’ve probably heard of Eadweard Muybridge, who used a series of sequential photos to show that all four hooves of a galloping horse could be off the ground at the same time. But there are many more odd and interesting stories here, such as:
The earliest color photos used dyed granules of potato starch affixed to a varnished glass plate which was then exposed in the camera to “produce a glorious color positive transparency, which was then held up to light source” for viewing. But it could not be reproduced—each autochrome was one of a kind.
Carte de visitès were such a popular fad in the 19th century that Queen Victoria owned 36 albums of them. Both Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth used these small photo cards to fund their work, counter racist imagery and shape perceptions. And Truth was one of the first to attempt to copyright a photograph.
Anna Atkins published the first “photographically illustrated book” using cyanotypes to show the wispy details of algae. The process she used is better known in its later iteration of making architectural blueprints.
An optical instrument manufacturer used a microscope to shrink an image of a daguerreotype to a miniscule eighth of an inch, an achievement of no commercial value until armies started using it to send messages during war. With some further refinements, this resulted in microfilm and microdots.
Making your own X-ray images was very trendy in the late 1800s, which led to radiation poisoning and attempts to use the technique to capture photos of thoughts and of people’s physic auras.
The early innovators in photography literally risked their lives to advance the craft, whether from exposure to the deadly chemicals used in processing daguerreotypes and the wet collodion process, to having limbs blown off by unstable flash powder, to the inherent risks in ballooning and underwater exploration in the nineteenth century.
Foreshadowing modern controversies over Photoshopping and AI, in the mid-1800s there was even a raging debate about whether or not it was permissible to create photo composites by, for example, adding a sky with clouds to a landscape photo, adding or removing people or objects from an image, or airbrushing away wrinkles and imperfections. Is a photograph an object of truth or a work of art? Questions still unresolved 150 years later.
“Flashes of Brilliance” is an enjoyable and interesting book. It may not improve your photography, but it will give you a better appreciation of the discoveries and discoverers that made photography what it is today. And, you’ll walk away with a basket of fun, quirky and amusing anecdotes you can use in conversation with other shutterbugs.