The elegant dark-blue walls of Anika Burgess’ home office in Westchester County, New York, are enhanced by framed black-and-white photographs. One is a 19th-century image of a gaslit street, another is a Tina Modotti print of a typewriter, and there’s a shot of a plane landing at Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong, where Burgess, who holds Australian and British nationalities, once lived. The photos are a glimpse into Burgess’ love of the art form—a passion that shines through in her first book, Flashes of Brilliance: The Genius of Early Photography and How It Transformed Art, Science, and History (Norton, July 8).

“A scintillating history that’ll have you looking at photography in a new light,” according to our starred review, Flashes of Brilliance digs deep into the practice’s little-known origins. Burgess, a former visual editor at Atlas Obscura, writes of the pioneers Louis Daguerre, Eadweard Muybridge, and Nadar, among others, but she also tells of obscure figures who made advances in underwater photography, lunar photography, microphotography, spirit photography (manipulated images that featured “ghosts”), rocket photography, pigeon photography (“The pigeon is the first bird to become a photographer,” wrote the New York Tribune in 1908), and kite photography (a quieter—if less controllable—precursor to today’s drone photography). As Burgess found, early photography could be a perilous undertaking, with chemicals and explosions injuring and killing numerous people. “I don’t think I was prepared for it to be as dangerous as it was,” she says. “I think people might be surprised to learn the death count in this book.”

Burgess spoke to Kirkus on a video call from her home, the framed photos behind her. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What made you want to turn away from the present and look at the early days of photography?

We’re constantly barraged with images, and we can take photographs at any moment. I think that by looking back at what photographers had to overcome—and looking at all of the difficulties and the innovations and the experiments—helps bring a renewed appreciation for what we’re now able to do.

When did your fascination with photography begin?

Pretty early. I remember I got a DSLR [digital single-lens reflex] camera in the mid-’90s, which I love—an old Minolta, which I still have. I always loved taking photographs, and I was always interested in historical and archival photography. And then when I started reading about the people involved in its earliest days—that was when my interest became really piqued in terms of telling it as a history.

 There are so many great details in your book. For instance, more than a century ago, some people had photographs printed on their skin and fingernails. Where did you find that?

I first read about it in Cyanide & Spirits, by Bill Jay, which is a great book. And then I did some subsequent research through 19th-century photographic journals, which is how I did a lot of my research. It seems to have been a trend that kind of came and went and came back again. I love this idea of it being like a temporary tattoo, basically.

Kite photography was a thing in the late 19th century. I love the story you include about how it was used to solve a crime. Tell us about that.

William Eddy—his name kept coming up in these journals in the 1880s and 1890s. He was a kite photographer of some note. And according to local newspapers, he had had some ice cream delivered to the porch of his house for—I think it was his daughter’s birthday. And when he realized it had gone missing, he sent up his kite camera to take photographs. And lo and behold, the plate revealed an empty ice cream tub under a tree, which he subsequently located—although the perpetrators were no longer there. I think it is fair to say that was probably the one and only time that kite photography was used for crime-solving purposes.

Has writing this book turned you into a gearhead? Do you own any old or obscure cameras?

I have an old Argoflex, which I would love to put into action. I think it’s from the ’50s. What it has done is really put me onto very old historical books. Some friends gave me a 1909 American photography annual. There’s just something so lovely about turning over pages of an original magazine or journal.

Have you experimented with any of the old cameras you wrote about?

I haven’t, but I have tried my hand at a couple of the genres, you could say. I have a telescope, and I’ve tried taking photographs through it. It’s surprisingly difficult. I found myself confounded by mist and imperceptible tiny movements. I’ve also experimented with cyanotypes, which are really fun to do because they’re a camera-less process, and the most important part is to keep the paper in the dark until you’re ready to expose it. And also to find an interestingly shaped object because it captures the shape of the object rather than the photograph of the image. I used things like flattened plants. I tried some of my son’s Lego pieces—anything I could find in the house, just sort of seeing how it worked.

What can some of the earliest methods of photography teach us about photography today?

You had to take all of your equipment with you to whatever you wanted to photograph. And you didn’t have a light meter—you had to judge the light. And you had to judge your own exposure. And now we can put a burst function on our phone and take a thousand tiny snaps in a minute. So from those early techniques, I think a sense of patience is something that we could take from it.

Of the photographers you profile, who would most likely be big on Instagram?

Nadar, without question. He sounds like he would have been very entertaining and very much full of life. I mean, here is a man who was so fascinated by flight, he built this enormous balloon. And maybe Muybridge. He was a big self-promoter who was so good at heralding his own genius.

We’re drowning in digital images, but sometimes I wonder how many printed photos from our time will survive into the future. Is this a concern for you?

It is, as someone who has worked a lot in photo archives. I love working in an archive. It’s such a tactile, evidentiary place where you can see a photograph and touch it and get more information from the back of it. Today, with everything being digital, what are the archives of the future going to look like for the photographers of today? I don’t know what the answer is.

Where do you see photography headed in the next century?

I get worried about AI images, of course. I get really concerned about the ability of people to recognize what is and isn’t an AI-generated photograph. I would hope that in the future it continues to evolve with integrity—photography as a whole, I mean. But I think we need some considerable guardrails—better than what we have now. Because not only is it easier to fake an image with AI, it’s also so much faster to share it. Those two things combined really challenge the integrity of actual photography.

John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.