Book overview
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 detail, 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
