FLASHES OF BRILLIANCE

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.