Kate Flint

Darkness visible | 16 November 2017

Flash gets a bad press for its invasiveness – yet it brings a form of democracy to the material world

issue 18 November 2017

All photography requires light, but the light used in flash photography is unique — shocking, intrusive and abrupt. It’s quite unlike the light that comes from the sun, or even from ambient illumination. It explodes, suddenly, into darkness.

The history of flash goes right back to the challenges faced by early photographers who wanted to use their cameras in places where there was insufficient light — indoors, at night, in caves. The first flash photograph was probably a daguerreotype of a fossil, taken in 1839 by burning limelight. For the next 50 years, photographers experimented with limelight, which was familiar from theatre illumination, with portable battery-driven lights — which Nadar used in his well-known photos of the Paris catacombs — and with magnesium. Magnesium was available in pulverised form and blown through a flame, or ignited in lengths of wire, or mixed into various unstable, if brightly explosive compounds.

Then, in 1887, as magnesium extraction suddenly became much cheaper, a composite flash powder was invented by the German chemists Adolf Miethe and Johannes Gaedicke.

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