Audrey Sands

Throughout photography’s history, practitioners have experimented with means of creating instantaneous, portable sources of illumination in order to capture spaces, scenes, and movements that might otherwise remain invisible. Liberating the camera from the constraints of darkness, flash and strobe illumination have driven nearly two centuries of technological innovation, expanding the frontiers of our knowledge, inspiring visual expression, and permeating all areas of photographic picture-making. My current book project, “FLASH! The Shape of Light: History, Ethics, and Aesthetics of Flash Photography,” [Our style guide uses italics only for book projects under contract with a press] surveys the origins, uses, and aesthetics of flash, one of the most significant yet understudied innovations in photography. The first comprehensive undertaking dedicated to this theme, it explores the many functions of flash in photography: as a means of freezing motion, as an instrument for disrupting darkness, as a record of evidence, as a tool for surveillance and forensics, as a form of social and political provocation, and as an art form.

Flash light—with its strong cast shadows, unforgiving exposure, bright reflections, and flattening effects—has been used by documentarians, scientists, and artists alike to achieve numerous visual and social aim. Examples range from Jacob Riis’s revelatory study of slum housing in nineteenth-century New York to Harold Edgerton’s strobe photography of bullets mid-flight; from Berenice Abbott’s “multiple flash” illustrations for science textbooks and Weegee’s lurid, nocturnal crime scene snaps for tabloids to Walker Evans’s and Russell Lee’s illuminations of migrant workers and tenant farmers’ housing during the Great Depression for the U.S. Farm Security Administration.

As flash operates at the threshold between visibility and invisibility, its effects teeter on the boundary between truth and illusion. One of the guiding questions of this project, therefore, will be: What does it mean to “shine a light” on something? How does the mechanized vision of flash enhance or, at other times, interrupt the parameters of our unaided sight? How has flash technology illuminated unfair or unsafe living and working conditions and aided in the plight for social reform? What are the implications of flash lighting for the fields of law, the practice of warfare, and the investigation of crime scenes? By tracing this history, this project will make a critical intervention in our understanding of photography and the role of images writ large in our society and institutions.