A scintillating history that’ll have you looking at photography in a new light.
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.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781324051107
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.
A potent series of “notes” paints a multidimensional picture of Blackness in America.
Throughout the book, which mixes memoir, history, literary theory, and art, Sharpe—the chair of Black studies at York University in Toronto and author of the acclaimed book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being—writes about everything from her family history to the everyday trauma of American racism. Although most of the notes feature the author’s original writing, she also includes materials like photographs, copies of letters she received, responses to a Twitter-based crowdsourcing request, and definitions of terms collected from colleagues and friends (“preliminary entries toward a dictionary of untranslatable blackness”). These diverse pieces coalesce into a multifaceted examination of the ways in which the White gaze distorts Blackness and perpetuates racist violence. Sharpe’s critique is not limited to White individuals, however. She includes, for example, a disappointing encounter with a fellow Black female scholar as well as critical analysis of Barack Obama’s choice to sing “Amazing Grace” at the funeral of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed in a hate crime at the Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. With distinct lyricism and a firm but tender tone, Sharpe executes every element of this book flawlessly. Most impressive is the collagelike structure, which seamlessly moves among an extraordinary variety of forms and topics. For example, a photograph of the author’s mother in a Halloween costume transitions easily into an introduction to Roland Barthes’ work Camera Lucida, which then connects just as smoothly to a memory of watching a White visitor struggle with the reality presented by the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. “Something about this encounter, something about seeing her struggle…feels appropriate to the weight of this history,” writes the author. It is a testament to Sharpe’s artistry that this incredibly complex text flows so naturally.
An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780374604486
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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