Flash! Photography, Writing, & Surprising Illumination by Kate Flint

Flash! Photography, Writing, & Surprising Illumination by Kate Flint published by Oxford University Press is one of the most beautiful and brilliant book that you can pick up if you are a a curious, passionate reader of photography and in particular of the history of flash as a compenatrating part of the world of images.
I remember the old flash used at the end of 1970s by my relatives when they returned here loving to take wagons of pictures, also during the evenings and in prohibitive conditions. It was a joy. Memories of good time spent together. And a magic, to me, at that time a toddler.
I have always been a picture addicted and I try to bring with me my digital camera and smart phone wherever I go. I am a reporter and I consider pictures for their visual impact one of the best part of our life for remembering moments, instants, people, writing apart.
A picture is this one, also when taken during the night.
It is true that photography is a dream as well.
The invention of photography meant first of all the possibility of impressing an instant of the life of someone for the posterity and eternity. A pic becomes history immediately after taken and it is forever because in grade to immortalize our living, giving back not just dignity, but possibility and power: which one? That the picture could be seen and shared by many other people after a lot of generations.
Places and people could return to be alive, in the tales of folk anxious to remember the dear good old times, admiring customs and traditions maybe lost forever.
Not sure if these thoughts are taken in consideration in an era in which we are immersed in an ocean of pictures, images, and where photography, thanks to smart phones, tablets, is becoming complex, articulated, funny, deformed, hilarious, serious, vintage, painted, colored, retro. In a word: modified and common.

But, flash... what did flash mean for photography?
Well, it was the answer at the discovery of photography and at the other side of that story: the nocturnal aspect at first not immortalized.

How could it be possible to taking pictures during the night? Or in a room without sufficient lights?

We all know, as also explains the author with a brilliant tale, that there are natural flashes. Let's see the ones, flashes of lightning caused by a temporal: but...How could it be possible to recreate a condition, an artificial one in grade to give us answers and a good picture?
Magnesium was the answer. This metal extracted in combination with other ones at first was very expensive. Magnesium and tools in grade to give good pictures and answers, (price decreased with the time) took a lot of time, and...various experiments, as you will read.
The arrival of flash was saluted with joy, surprise, magic, enchantment, retinic problems! and later also with anger, fear.
Yes, because flash was seen also under a different aspect; a picture "stolen" thanks to a flash at a celeb by a paparazzo, or in an embarrassing situation was and still is reason of anger for the violated privacy.

The book analyzes all the aspects of flash, death...including, for arriving at the use of modern flash telling also in a chapter what it meant for reporters the utilization of the more modern flash in the first decades of 1900s (first ones were not so practicals), starting to use it for every kind of news, from a murder to a happy event. Newsmagazines discovered a new opportunity: close to the article, pictures of people, events,  taken in consideration. Most of these pictures don't have an owner, just hands who took them. Reporters were not credited, but these pictures maybe for this reason are powerful: they were the first ones.

I highly suggest this book to all of you, passionate of photography, picture addicted, people constantly with a digital camera or a smart phone in your hands ready to take a picture for posting it on Instagram or just for saving it, remembering the moment.

Not just beauty, this book thanks to the bubbling narration made by Kate Flint is a brilliant reconstruction of flash plenty of facts, curiosities, and of course...pictures.

I thank Oxford University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori