Candid New York: The Pioneering Photography of George Bradford Brainerd

The American entrepreneur George Eastman has been called “the father of the snapshot,” bringing photography to the masses with his compact Kodak camera in 1888. But more than a decade earlier, a Connecticut-born inventor devised ingenious hand-held cameras, which he used to record daily life on the streets of New York. As early as 1870, before dry plates were commercially available, George Bradford Brainerd, a civil engineer with the Brooklyn water department, developed photographic plates with more sensitive film emulsions to freeze action which had previously been a blur. Brainerd used the new technology to document the colorful street types he saw as he went about his rounds—fruit peddlers, artisans, musicians, dock workers, newsboys, launderesses, and even beggars—laying the groundwork for photojournalists like Jacob Riis and Louis Hine. But in America in the early 1880s, when Brainerd was active, such documentary or “street photography” was unknown. Candid New York is the first published work on this pioneering American inventor, once hailed as the “father of instantaneous photography.”