Flashes of Brilliance Photography Book Talk

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 deftly illustrating how the rise of a new art form transformed culture and our view of the world.

Anika Burgess is a writer and photo editor. She has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Atlas Obscura. Anika has won a Front Page Award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York and has presented at Photoville New York. 

Jane Beiles is a commercial and editorial photographer based in Fairfield, Connecticut who has contributed to over 100 features for the New York Times primarily for the HOME, DESIGN and TRAVEL sections. Her work has been published by Elle Décor, Architectural Digest, the Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other print and digital titles.

FREE for Carriage Barn members or with book pre-order.  $10 for non-members.

Elegantly written … Flashes of Brilliance] is also a lot of fun. … Through painstaking research and her obvious love of the medium, Burgess succeeds in reminding us how special this ‘small miracle of chemistry, optics, and light’ really is.
— Michael Patrick Brady, Washington Post

An entertaining romp through the whirlwind years of early photography. … By tracing how the technology developed, Flashes of Brilliance reminds readers what a marvel photography is.
— Angelina Torre, Wall Street Journal