A scintillating history that’ll have you looking at photography in a new light.
Say “prunes”—as people were once advised when sitting for austere portraits.
Photography is a dangerous business. Or at least it used to be. Consider some of the perils that Burgess chronicles in her enlightening book about the early days of the industry. In the mid-19th century, a photo chemist’s windows blew out as gun cotton—a darkroom ingredient—exploded. Two years later, the man wasn’t as lucky: He was killed in another explosion. In the 1880s, German scientists invented Blitzlichtpulver, or lightning flash powder, which provided illumination for photographers. True to its name, the stuff was potent. In 1890, a photographer eager to document the opening of the Pulitzer Building in Manhattan packed an “extra quantity” of flash powder, causing a blast that took out 50 windows. Beyond working with explosives, photographers used cyanide as a fixing agent. It was lethal when it got into cuts, and touching it led to swelling, “intolerable” pain, and amputations. Happily, not all is grim in this entertaining account. Burgess, a former visual editor at Atlas Obscura, tells of many creative photographers, going back to Nicéphore Niépce, whose modest shot out a window dates to 1826. (Be grateful, Instagrammers: The world’s oldest surviving photo took eight hours to capture.) Among the author’s better-known subjects is the creative Frenchman Nadar. Burgess’ dry wit comes through in this description: “Like most people who operate under a mononym, he was also a talented self-promoter.” Nadar took cameras into the catacombs and sewers of Paris and above the city, in his balloon Le Géant (which was taller than the Statue of Liberty). Aerial photography drew experimenters at the time—one of the many images included shows a woman (probably Lela Cody, photographer Samuel Cody’s wife) dangling from a batlike kite. The book is packed with equally astonishing details, covering the fields of underwater photography, microphotography (great for concealing sexually explicit images), and—long before artificial intelligence—photo manipulation.
A scintillating history that’ll have you looking at photography in a new light.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781324051107
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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