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. 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.

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 captured the world as never seen before, showing for the first time the bones of humans, the motion of animals, the cells of plants, and the structure of snowflakes. Burgess also delves into the early connections between photography and society that are still with us today: how photo manipulation was an issue right from the start; how the police used the telephoto lens to surveil suffragists; and how leading Black figures adapted self-portraits to assert their identity and autonomy.