This is CBS, I On the World. I'm John Baxter with Anika Burgess, the author of the new book, Flashes of Brilliance.

Highly recommended, if you take photographs with your iPhone, you're succeeding in an experiment that's been going on for almost 200 years, starting in Paris.

Now we come to how the daring due of the early

photographers turned into revelations that were capable of moving whole cultures, whole countries,

and that we're still on the grip of that movement. I'm talking about poverty.

Anika, wonderful story of Jacob Rees, a migrant who lives hard-scrabble life and the poverty of Lower Manhattan Five Points is how I imagine him coming to the city.

And he becomes a newspaper man, and then all of a sudden, he has an

idea of a camera. What does he do with the camera? And I believe it's wet collodian or dry

collodian that he's using. Who is he? Yeah. So as you mentioned, he was a newspaper man. He came

from Denmark to America and managed to establish

himself after some very hard years. And he began documenting in his writing the conditions of the

tenements in Manhattan, which were, of course, incredibly grim, very dirty, full of disease.

And he felt that the words that he was writing wasn't having enough of an impact of what he was really witnessing.

And he was reading in the newspaper one day about something new, something called flashpowder.

And it was a brand new invention that enabled photographers to take photographs at night in dark

spaces underground, sorry.

And so he began experimenting with that.

And that is how he was able to go into the tenements with his camera using flash powder

to illuminate the interiors and what he saw people packed into rooms and

their grim conditions and then show those to the public to make it very clear

exactly how people lived.

And of course, he translated that into a book that he wrote, a well-known book called

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