Flash! Photography, Writing, & Surprising Illumination

Flash photography is distinctive: artificial, sudden, shocking, intrusive, and extraordinarily bright! Drawing upon visual studies, technology, race studies, literature, and film, Kate Flint presents the first cultural history of the medium worldwide from its mid‑nineteenth century beginnings to the present day. Used by professionals and amateurs, news hounds and art photographers, and photographers of crime and of wildlife, flash photography has great power- it revealed shocking social conditions, impacted on the representation of race, became the feared weapon of paparazzi, and recorded the biggest flash of all, the atomic bomb. Generously illustrated, Flash! brings out the central role of this medium to the history of photography, and in doing so challenges some commonly held ideas about the nature of photography itself.