Written in Light

In the summer of 1826, in an attic in Burgundy, a gentleman scientist named Nicéphore Niépce pointed a small box at the rooftops outside his window and waited — for hours, perhaps for days — until the sunlight had etched a faint, ghostly view onto a sheet of pewter. It was the first photograph, the first time a human being had caught a slice of the visible world and made it stay. Two centuries later, the people of the earth take more pictures every two minutes than existed in the whole of the nineteenth century.

Written in Light tells the whole astonishing story in between — in vivid, cinematic scenes and plain, patient explanation. Here is Daguerre and his silver mirror; Fox Talbot and the paper negative that made the print possible; the empty Paris boulevard with the first human ever photographed; Muybridge settling a rich man's wager over a galloping horse; George Eastman promising that "you press the button, we do the rest"; Dorothea Lange at a roadside pea-pickers' camp; Cartier-Bresson and his decisive moment; and a young Kodak engineer named Steven Sasson holding the first digital camera, a device the size of a toaster that his own company would fail to understand.

Warm, surprising, and gloriously readable, this is the one book for anyone who has ever wondered how a thing as fleeting as light was tamed — and how the humble photograph came to shape memory, truth, art, and the modern self, right up to the moment a machine learned to make pictures of things that never happened.