Sunday Books & Culture - Nonfiction
Penny Parris reveals her nonfiction favorite of the year - Anika Burgess’s fascinating history of photography, “Flashes of Brilliance.”
FLASHES OF BRILLIANCE
by Anika Burgess
Published by W. W. Norton & Company (July 8, 2025)
Hardcover $26.43
Audiobook $14.99
Reviewed by Penny A Parrish
I bought this book because I am a fine arts photographer based in Fredericksburg. The expanded title reads “The Genius of Early Photography and How it Transformed Art, Science and History.” If that sounds dry, this is anything but. It’s an absolute delight!
The beginnings of photography often involved scientists (some fitting the “mad” description), doctors, tinkerers, and inventors. I’ll highlight some of my favorite revelations:
In the late 19th century in Paris and Chicago, people had photographs printed on their skin and on fingernails.
Picric acid, used in flash powder, is highly explosive. It fell out of use decades ago, but a batch was found at a school laboratory in Olney, Maryland, in 2022. Many people lost their lives trying to figure out how to bring light to photography.
In the late 1880s, Jacob Riis used a camera and flash powder to expose the dangerous and filthy conditions in NYC tenements. He’d walk up a dark staircase and set off the flash, resulting in astonished looks from his subjects.
In 1869, residents were warned not to hang a photo on a green wall as it was likely to fade due to arsenic in the green paint.
William H. Mumler produced “spirit photographs” in New York. He manipulated photos which showed the buyer sitting with a ghostly specter. One of his customers was Mary Todd Lincoln.
In the late 19th century, “photo fiends” took candid photos of celebrities and women’s ankles as they bathed at a beach. They made a lot of money doing this (some things haven’t changed, unfortunately).
Tiny cameras, hidden in buttonholes or top hats, took pictures inside courtrooms.
Burgess provides fascinating details on photography from balloons (and kites carrying people), underwater cameras (the diver/photographer wore equipment weighing at least 170 pounds), and how Eastman revolutionized photography for the common man (or woman) with his Kodak #1 in 1888.
If you’ve ever been to a meeting or a convention where you traded business cards, you’ll appreciate the section on carte-de-visites. They were small cards with photos – of you, your family, your dog – whatever you wanted to share with someone. People collected these and put them into albums (Queen Victoria had 36 albums). After the death of Prince Albert, more than 70,000 orders came in for his carte-de-visite.
One of the most fascinating chapters covers x-rays – how they came about and the terrible deaths of many people who were over-exposed to the harmful rays. It must have been unbelievable to see inside your body. X-ray machines were available for home entertainment. For a penny on a London Street in 1896, you could have your bones x-rayed. By Christmas of that year, x-rays were featured on family holiday cards.
This is just a taste of the research done by Burgess. The writing is engaging, often humorous, and the book is filled with accompanying archival photographs. I wish I could share it with my dad, who studied photography at the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1930s. Anyone who carries around a camera (most of us have one attached to our hand as a cell phone) will delight in how we ever got this far in capturing a moment in time.
Penny A Parrish is a local writer and photographer. You can see her pictures at her website.
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