Candid New York: The Pioneering Photography of George Bradford Brainerd

Historian Hesselberg (Night Boat to New York) offers an evocative retrospective of the work of George Bradford Brainerd, an engineer with the Brooklyn Water Department and an early pioneer in the burgeoning field of photography. Brainerd (1845–1887) built his first camera at age 12 using lenses from old opera glasses. As early as 1875, he was using a camera of his own design that was likely the world’s first handheld camera. By disguising the camera as a book or a brown paper package, and implementing numerous technological innovations that freed him of the need for a tripod, he was able to capture candid moments. His favored subjects were manual laborers, and his body of work is notable for depicting bygone professions, such as the soap fat man, who collected fat waste to be used in making soap. Further innovations allowed Brainerd to take the first “instantaneous” snapshots. (Indeed, Brainerd often singled out 1877’s The Soap Fat Man as his first successful instantaneous snapshot—it shows the eponymous man “walking with his foot off the ground.”) After Brainerd was diagnosed with cancer—possibly stemming from exposure to toxic photographic chemicals—he created the first camera capable of taking pictures of the human larynx. The book lavishly spotlights the best of Brainerd’s candid snaps of New York City’s Gilded Age denizens. N.Y.C. history buffs will love this. (Oct.)