The story of the wildest experiments in early photography and the wild people who undertook them.

Today it’s routine to take photos from an airplane window, use a camera under the sea, or gaze at an X-ray. But the innovations more than a century ago that made such things possible were incredible and sometimes dangerous, and the innovators often memorable eccentrics. In this absorbing mix of science, art, and social history, Anika Burgess describes early aerial photography experiments with balloons, kites, and pigeons; reveals how photographers first captured the surface of the moon, the bottom of the sea, and the structure of snowflakes; recounts the race to photograph motion and how it led to moving pictures; and delves into photography’s social effects, including the use of the telephoto lens to surveil suffragists and of self-portraits by Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass to assert their 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.

Praise & Reviews

“Say “prunes”—as people were once advised when sitting for austere portraits. Photography is a dangerous business. Or at least it used to be. Consider some of the perils that Burgess chronicles in her enlightening book about the early days of the industry. In the mid-19th century, a photo chemist’s windows blew out as gun cotton—a darkroom ingredient—exploded. Two years later, the man wasn’t as lucky: He was killed in another explosion. In the 1880s, German scientists invented Blitzlichtpulver, or lightning flash powder, which provided illumination for photographers. True to its name, the stuff was potent. In 1890, a photographer eager to document the opening of the Pulitzer Building in Manhattan packed an “extra quantity” of flash powder, causing a blast that took out 50 windows. Beyond working with explosives, photographers used cyanide as a fixing agent. It was lethal when it got into cuts, and touching it led to swelling, “intolerable” pain, and amputations. Happily, not all is grim in this entertaining account. Burgess, a former visual editor at Atlas Obscura, tells of many creative photographers, going back to Nicéphore Niépce, whose modest shot out a window dates to 1826. (Be grateful, Instagrammers: The world’s oldest surviving photo took eight hours to capture.) Among the author’s better-known subjects is the creative Frenchman Nadar. Burgess’ dry wit comes through in this description: “Like most people who operate under a mononym, he was also a talented self-promoter.” Nadar took cameras into the catacombs and sewers of Paris and above the city, in his balloon Le Géant (which was taller than the Statue of Liberty). Aerial photography drew experimenters at the time—one of the many images included shows a woman (probably Lela Cody, photographer Samuel Cody’s wife) dangling from a batlike kite. The book is packed with equally astonishing details, covering the fields of underwater photography, microphotography (great for concealing sexually explicit images), and—long before artificial intelligence—photo manipulation.

A scintillating history that’ll have you looking at photography in a new light.”

–Kirkus, Starred Review

“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.”

–Publishers Weekly

“Flashes of Brilliance is a fascinating immersion among the obsessive rogues, daring experimenters, and fearless pioneers who risked life and limb to bring photography to life. From submarine cameras to pigeon photographers, Burgess’ 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, and to have details filled in with well-focused observation. … As a work that brings early photographers and their experiments to vivid life, as a gallery of sketches for historical and societal backgrounds to today's photographic practice, Flashes of Brilliance is a valuable addition to any photographer's bookshelf. In wearing its researched insights lightly, it's both a fun and educational read.”

–Tom Ang, author of Photography: The Definitive Visual History

“To our eyes, the first photo portraits can look stiff and dull, the sitters stripped of life like insects trapped in amber. Burgess helps us see these pictures in new ways, showing us the vital, flesh-and-blood stories of photographers and their careers—their hopes, struggles, dreams, and frustrations. Cleverly weaving together photography, art, and science, she not only reveals 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, former Head of Photographs, National Portrait Gallery, London

“Anika Burgess’ charming history of photography delights in the strange and fascinating details of photography’s formative years, featuring everything from recipes for photographer’s cheesecake to experiments with kite or pigeon photography and hidden cameras. She 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. Burgess’ 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