Let There Be Light

Another book review I wrote is out now at The Faster Times: “Let There Be Light: The TFT Review of The Luminist.”

Over 185 years since Nicéphore Niépce took the world’s first photograph—a photogravure of Pope Pius VII in 1822—the process of photography continues to develop in unanticipated ways. From heliography and silver chloride to Adobe Lightroom and digital single-lens reflex cameras, pioneers would scarcely recognize the 19th-century industry they helped to define. One these innovators, Julia Margaret Cameron, spent her life developing techniques for taking soft-focus portraits, and her surviving prints include an image of her niece, Julia Prinsep Jackson, mother of Virginia Woolf. But that isn’t Julia Margaret Cameron’s only connection to literature: the portrait she took of Woolf’s mother now graces the cover of a novel Cameron’s own life inspired: David Rocklin’s The Luminist.