What comes to mind when you think of 19th-century photography? Dull sepia plates of formal gardens? Or perhaps the winsome pre-Raphaelite wannabes of Julia Margaret Cameron’s staged portraits? Well, think again. In Flashes of Brilliance, the American photo editor Anika Burgess surveys a world of invention and action teeming with chancers, pornographers, detectives, deep-sea divers and balloonists. And then there are the camera-wielding pigeons.
Photography celebrates its bicentenary next year, marking the moment circa 1826 when Nicéphore Niépce — a French inventor who also tinkered with the notion of a motorcycle — shot a blurry composition of rooftops in eastern France. View from the Window at Le Gras was preserved on a pewter plate treated with a cocktail of bitumen and lavender oil.
View from the Window at Le Gras by Nicéphore Niépce
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A variety of ambitious and often quite barmy pioneers were waiting in the wings. Burgess considers the introduction of the daguerreotype in 1839 as the game-changer. Louis Daguerre, a former scene painter for the Paris Opera, devised a process of fixing an image on a silver-coated metal plate. “Here was a new medium, bursting with potential, ready to be harnessed with new technology, new approaches, and some highly risky endeavours,” Burgess writes.
The range of combustible and poisonous chemicals — from gun cotton to cyanide — demanded by subsequent photographic methods provided fledgeling shutterbugs with a “host of novel and exciting ways to injure themselves”. Photographers routinely blew themselves up (a scenario spoofed in Kind Hearts and Coronets when Dennis Price’s character uses a darkroom explosion as a cover for murder).
In 1887, the introduction of Blitzlichtpulver — flashlight powder — only made matters worse. This precursor to the flashbulb was a highly volatile blend of pyrotechnic compounds. “Photographers lost fingers and thumbs, hands and hair,” Burgess writes. “That’s if they were lucky.”
The New York Sun noted sniffily: “The abuse of flash powders after they fall into photographers’ hands reflects severely upon their intelligence and good sense”
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Burgess gives a clear and fascinating whistlestop history, from the 1830s through to 1910, of the various technical advances, culminating in the near inconceivable innovation of the x-ray (now photographers could capture what couldn’t even be seen). But it is the accounts of those amateurs and adventurers who conquered the skies, oceans and subterranean spaces with their makeshift cameras
that really enthral.
Early aerial photography, in particular, delivered outrageous displays of hope over reason. Samuel Cody, an expat American living in England, designed a kite shaped like a giant bat that could carry a photographer (he used his wife as an airborne guinea pig). In Germany, a pharmacist and pigeon fancier called Julius Neubronner patented lightweight cameras that could be strapped to a bird’s breast. Time-delayed shots were taken on the wing, resulting in panoramas fringed with feathers.
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The peacock in this squadron of flying photographers was a flamboyant French showman named Nadar (real name Gaspard-Félix Tournachon). To keep ballast to a minimum, he took his first sky-high shots while dangling from a balloon in the nude. Later, he built Le Géant, a vast balloon that stood 196ft high and carried a two-storey basket that slept 12 passengers and housed a darkroom, kitchen and, naturellement, a fully stocked wine store. In 1863, it crash-landed in the countryside and was dragged through the undergrowth for 25 miles. After narrowly missing an oncoming steam train, it finally slammed to a halt, sending Nadar’s wife flying out of the basket and into a river. Being married to a photographer was a dangerous business.
Felix Nadar, who took his first sky-high shots while dangling from a balloon in the nude
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Nadar also took his cameras underground to photograph the Paris catacombs, home to six million skeletons. A portrait of him surrounded by skulls is perhaps the earliest example of a ghoulish selfie.
Skulls and bones in the Paris catacombs
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Meanwhile, the first underwater photograph — a rather hazy wet collodion print — was taken in 1856 by William Thompson, a solicitor from Weymouth. Thompson sealed his camera in a homemade waterproof box, rowed out into Weymouth Bay, rowed back and processed the print in a tent on the beach, all in the time it took to make a cup of tea. Four decades later, a French mollusc specialist called Louis Boutan photographed the knobbly knees of swimmers in the Mediterranean.
Photography was seen initially not as art but truth, Burgess explains. Photographs were “drawings from nature through the medium of the rays of the sun”, declared the Morning Chronicle. Others called them “mirrors with memories”. But their power to hoodwink soon became apparent. Fraudulent spirit photographers — using double exposures and multiple negatives to introduce “ghosts” into the frame — preyed on the grieving. And it became commonplace to “retouch” portraits to flatter the sitter — experts recommended “considerable pruning” of double chins.
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Questions of voyeurism, privacy and obscenity surfaced. During divorce cases, detectives used secret cameras to gain evidence of cheating Victorians. And in 1908, at Bow Street magistrates’ court, the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst was snapped in the dock by a press photographer using a camera hidden in a hat. Smut — previously limited to etchings — proliferated. In 1870, the Society for the Suppression of Vice declared that it had helped the police to seize a vast cache of 134,000 naughty pictures (one of the arresting officers was an Inspector Cocks).
Emmeline Pankhurst in the dock at Bow Street magistrates’ court in 1908
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Burgess has made an old and arcane subject new and thrilling. Her book also feels prescient arriving at a time when confusion reigns over the merits and perils of image-making in the age of AI. Her astounding, frequently funny narrative highlights how people have always gone to outrageous lengths to get the perfect shot. And, no doubt, they always will.
Flashes of Brilliance: The Genius of Early Photography and How It Transformed Art, Science, and History by Anika Burgess (Norton £25.99 pp320). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members