Flashes of Brilliance by Anika Burgess instant download

Flashes of Brilliance by Anika Burgess instant download

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 underwater, or 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, New York Times 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 and an eye for the compelling detail, Burgess explores how photographers uncovered new vistas, including dark caves and catacombs, cities at night, the depths of the ocean, and the surface of the moon. She describes how photographers...