From illumination to irritation

When literary critics take on photography, one of two things can happen. They can start from the premise that 'photography is itself a kind of modern writing' and, emphasizing its novelty, show how the new medium impacts on literary texts, producing new styles and modes of representation.¹ This is the approach taken, for example, by Michael North in Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word, a study of photography, film and avantgarde writing. Alternately, the critic can dig into familiar texts to find every mention of photography and the photographic, and with the resultant haul, conclude that the texts were really all about photography in the first place. If the references to photography are few and far between in the literary text, this can lead to some strained interpretation, as in Marcy Dinius's readings of Hawthorne and Melville in The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype.² In both cases, the critics ultimately stick to the textual turf they know best, with photography providing a new way to illuminate prose, poetry or drama (but mostly prose). Even if it is not the intention, photography tends to come off second best in this encounter.

In her rich and compelling cultural history of flash photography, Kate Flint for the most part avoids such pitfalls. Fictional texts are important in Flint's account of the changing meanings and uses of flash photography from its commercial introduction in the 1860s to its contemporary integration in camera phones. On the way she unearths a wealth of less-known texts, including Amy Levy's The Romance of a Shop (1888), as well as turning to more obvious ones such as Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954). At no point, though, does she privilege the literary over the (flash) photographic: the former is here to shed light on the latter, and not the other way round. Nor does she establish a hierarchy between the literary and other kinds of source: photographic journals, periodicals, manuals, and memoirs prove an essential and fertile field in which Flint seeks the traces of flash. In her comprehensive reconstruction of this technique of sudden and blinding artificial light, she takes a deep dive into The Photographic Times, Amateur Photographer, and the Journal of the Photographic Society of Philadelphia, among many others, as well as Popular Mechanics, Ebony, and of course Flash! It is in this archive of useful knowledge, the province of the serious amateur and professional photographer, that the secrets of Blitzlichtpulver are to be found. For even if this is not a technical history, Flint knows full well how important it is to get the technical side right, not least to satisfy the technophiles who compose a small but significant part of the audience for a book like this. In this mode, she effortlessly takes us from explosive magnesium and its alternative 'photogen', through the progressive advances from flashbulb to flashcube to electronic flash. I, for one, was very glad to get such a lucid explanation of red-eye in humans and blue-eye in cats and dogs (p263).

The technophiles should be satisfied then. But the book's main quarry lies elsewhere. It lies, for example, in showing how technological developments are inextricable from cultural politics, as in the case of Gordon Parks' Flash Photography (1947), a photo-manual in which instruction on the best angle for flash photography of groups contains an implicit intervention into the politics of pigmentation (p169). Or in drawing out the inter-implications of stroboscopic experiment and experimentation with LSD (pp88-92). Or in exploring the constellation of meanings and practices that includes fireworks, flares, fireflies, and the atomic bomb. These are just three examples of the fascinating and heterogeneous fruits of a profound work of research. This heterogeneous material is held together by the three questions that Flint consistently asks of her subject: what was the experience of flash (for the photographer, and for its subject and onlookers); what are the aesthetics of flash (that is, what do photographs made with...