The Rise of Psychobabble and the Brilliant History of Photography

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Today, on something you should know, how to optimize any vacation to make it a better vacation.

Then, psychobabble and the interesting way mental health language has crept into everyday conversation.

It's not like people get sad or apathetic anymore.

They get depressed.

And it's not like, oh, I'm self-conscious.

It's like, oh, I have social anxiety or I have an anxiety disorder.

Put all that together.

And then you have a culture where there's a lot of psychobabble, people using mental health to explain everything.

Also, how you can get bleach stains on your laundry, even though you don't use bleach, and the fascinating story of photography, including how dangerous it used to be.

Because flash photography was effectively pyrotechnics, it was combustible, it was incredibly risky to photographers, and many injured themselves or died trying to light a photograph with flash powder.

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Something you should know, fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life.

Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

So a vacation is supposed to be fun, but you can actually do things that make it even more fun.

Hi, and welcome to this episode of Something You Should Know.

So people actually study how people vacation and they've come up with some interesting findings.

First of all, longer isn't necessarily better.

Researchers found that well-being starts to improve in as little as two days.

So staying away for weeks isn't necessarily correlated with deriving the most happiness from your trip.

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And that is something you should know.

Mental health has become a big part of the conversation today.

And in some ways that may be a good thing.

But here's the catch.

As we talk about mental health more, We've also started tossing around clinical labels like casual slang.

If someone's sad, she must be depressed.

Kids are bouncing around the store, they must have ADD.

A difficult spouse?

Total narcissist.

But here's the problem.

Those are real diagnoses, not nicknames.

And using them loosely can distort the truth about what mental health really is.

My guest today is psychotherapist and author Joe Nucci, and he takes on this topic in his new book, Psycho Babble.

Viral Mental Health Myths and the Truth to Set You Free.

Hi, Joe.

Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Hey, thanks so much for having me.

So I can remember a time when we didn't throw around mental health terms.

You know, if somebody was sad, we didn't talk about how they have depression.

They would be sad and they'd get over it and life would go on.

And that's true with so many of these mental health terms.

And I'm wondering, how did that start?

When did it start?

And what's the value in it?

There's a few different factors that we want to think about here.

So one factor is that over time, the different criteria for what constitutes a mental health disorder or a mental illness have broadened and changed.

I think that it mostly has to do with how ubiquitous insurance has become over the last, like a medical insurance, over the last several decades, because what you've started to see is you started to see broader and broader definitions.

And so now, if anybody wants therapy, any therapist worth their salt can use the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Disorders, or the ICD, the International Classification of Disease, to make sure that you can get covered.

And so it's a very, very interesting game us shrinks are often playing in order to help people afford their care.

What I think has happened is that over time,

the line has started to get thinner and thinner.

And

the difference between what we might call like a problem of living, like something that we all struggle with and all go through, has started to become blurred a little bit.

Because to your point, it's not like people get sad or apathetic anymore.

They get depressed.

And it's not like, oh, I'm self-conscious or I'm kind of a nervous Nelly.

It's like, oh, I have social anxiety or I have an anxiety disorder.

So I think you kind of take that context with how the profession has changed for better or for worse, put all that together.

And then you kind of have a culture where there's a lot of, well there's a lot of psychobabble and there's a lot of people using mental health to explain everything.

Yeah.

Well, that's the thing.

There's a mental health component to everything.

Your child has, you know, ADHD or ADD or, you know, or you're depressed or your spouse is a narcissist or everything has this kind of mental health tag on it that just never was before.

And

frankly, I don't buy it in a lot of cases.

I don't buy it either.

You know, one of the things that we're trained to do as therapists in graduate school is we're trained to kind of like like validate and normalize.

Why?

Well, whenever you go see a therapist and they say it's okay to feel your feelings or they encourage you to feel your feelings more.

So I've seen it time and time again, and the literature does reflect this, that if you have an eating disorder or an anxiety disorder or you're struggling with depression and you learn how to kind of feel and express yourself, those symptoms will often go away.

But what I think is happening, whether or not people are realizing it, is they're going to therapy and they're not actually seeking help for mental illness.

They're seeking help for just for support for things in life that we all struggle with, like relationships, with work, you know, with answering these fundamental questions like, who am I?

And what does it all mean?

And then they're getting this treatment that's meant for mental illness symptoms.

And sometimes the answer is to not feel your feelings more deeply.

In therapy, we call this adaptive avoidance.

And it's an important skill for people to have.

You know, if you're a teenager and you're speaking in public for a first time, it's normal to feel nervous.

The solution is not, well, feel that anxiety and that nervousness as deeply as you possibly can.

And then that's the solution.

Well, the solution is actually suppress that a little bit, go on stage and experience the reward of, you know, doing a pretty good job for your first time and getting better at it.

And I think that a lot of times mental health enthusiasts, people who like talking about mental health or even mental health professionals have lost the plot.

So the idea you just brought up that I think is true for so many people is they go to a therapist for support.

Is that a reasonable reason to go to therapy to just have someone to talk to?

Or is that the role of a friend and paying somebody to be your friend is maybe not such a great idea?

It's a tough question to answer because it's all so contextual.

I would say that anyone who thinks that therapy might be helpful should go seek a consult.

And I think that we need to be open about pulling in other types of support.

We need to think about opening up to our friends more.

I'm very pro-coach.

I think that coaches absolutely serve a role in mental health care.

And if for no other reason, it's just that there's just not enough therapists.

I mean, the estimates have us anywhere from a few hundred thousand therapists to maybe around five or 700,000 therapists in the United States.

If all of us are seeing 40 patients a week, which most of us are not seeing that many, by the way, that still leaves tens of millions of people who have a diagnosable mental illness.

If we, by the stat, one in four people struggle with that, they're not getting care that need to.

And so it's also a supply and demand issue.

And I think that when it comes to problems of living, like struggles with dating or.

stuff at work or stuff that we all struggle with.

I think it's okay to look elsewhere for support.

I don't know about any other therapists listening out there, but I don't know when we were expected to be the wise sages that know everything about love and dating.

I mean, I find the journey of love just as confusing and exciting as everybody else.

I know a lot of psychology, and I'm not saying it never helps, but I don't necessarily think that we're the golden ticket.

So, there are people who see a therapist for a long time, like years and years and years.

And there are couples who go to couple marriage counseling for a long time

to

work out, I guess, to work out the problems of everyday life.

Is that a good idea to just keep going and going and going?

I've had in my practice people who come in and they certainly fit the criteria for having a mental disorder.

There's a lot of dysfunction going on.

And it's very, very curious.

What is often the case is they've had years and years and years of it.

They've often had years of what we might call psychodynamic or psychoanalytic therapy, where it is often weekly or more than once a week.

And there's a lot of free associating and a lot of processing and a lot of analyzing.

I'm not a hater of those modalities.

I was actually trained psychodynamically in grad school, but I think that if what you're getting, I completely agree.

If what you're getting is years and years

of talking and processing, but your symptoms are either A, staying the same or you're not getting better, then I wonder, well, what are you really there for?

And sometimes these types of patients have come to see me and they're often surprised that I push back a little bit and I ask, oh, well, you know, maybe we try a behavioral modality, you know, or we try to learn some skills.

And it's very interesting.

Sometimes people don't want that.

Sometimes people, they want us to kind of stay in

that hamster wheel.

So I want to talk about some of the myths that you tackle.

And one of them is that everyone gets depressed.

And I guess that would depend on what your definition of depression is.

I've always thought of depression as

people who get depressed get depressed, they get sad and withdrawn, but there's not a specific reason for it versus people who are sad, but there's a reason they're sad.

You know, perhaps someone died and so they're sad about that.

That's not depression.

That's just normal sadness.

This really brilliant researcher based out of Australia, whose name is escaping me.

I'll remember it in a moment.

But him and his team actually looked at like, I would say like millions of data points.

They looked at different journals and they found that it's not just

that

we now say depressed when we mean sad, it is, or apathetic.

It is now that actually the definition has expanded over time.

And that's why it's called concept creep.

It's the, it's just little by little the the boundaries of these concepts expand and expand and expand.

And

if everything is depression, nothing is depression, right?

Like if everything is mental health, then mental health kind of ceases to have any significance as a category.

And so I think that in the English language, we have terms to describe how we're feeling.

And I think that sometimes people maybe elevate it to mental health language so that it gets taken seriously.

And I certainly understand

feeling something and not feeling like you're being seen or understood or acknowledged and then feeling like you have to kind of turn up the volume so people get it, right?

And so you can get that acknowledgement.

But I do think that there's a social cost to that.

And I think that one of the costs is that, well, then everybody has to

meet that criteria of depression or of anxiety in order for their feelings to be valid or to be worth acknowledging.

And I don't think that's true.

I think that we can create a culture in which feelings are respected and honored and we're listening to how our loved ones are doing without necessarily needing to be quite that serious.

But very specifically, what is depression?

Just that answer to that.

In general, when we say depression, we mean somebody who feels an excessive amount of guilt, who is often tearful, maybe for no reason.

There could be

feelings or thoughts about hurting yourself in some way.

There is

often something we see is something

where there's like a disinterest in pleasure.

And so the things that typically bring you pleasure, whether it's working out or your job or going out with friends or, you know, eating good food or whatever it is, you often see that there's like a disinterest in that.

And those are just some of like the symptoms that we're actually looking for.

So let me, let me, let me ask you this though, because maybe a better question to ask you.

is rather than what is depression, what isn't depression that is often mistaken for depression?

I think feeling sad, feeling like you're in a slump,

feeling a little directionless in life.

If you are going through a breakup, right, it's normal.

You know, it's normal to feel heartbroken.

It's normal to feel like it's a little bit difficult to get out of bed.

Some people listening to this might say, oh, well, after my breakup, it was so bad.

I did experience depression.

And maybe you did.

Maybe it did get elevated to that extreme.

My argument is that we can experience all of these things because all of us go through these problems in living and they're not necessarily depression.

We already have the terms for them.

We already have the terms for feeling sad, for feeling apathetic, for feeling unmotivated.

And so when it comes to normal human struggles or human emotions that are included in the criteria of depression, but don't necessarily reach such an intensity that you need clinical attention.

I don't know that if we should be labeling those things.

We're talking about mental health.

My guest is Joe Nucci.

He's the author of a book called Psycho Babble, Viral Mental Health Myths and the Truths to Set You Free.

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So Joe, what about anxiety?

That word comes up a lot.

And oh,

he's got anxiety.

Oh, he has, as if it is a disease.

But anxiety,

I get anxiety when I'm anxious because things can make you anxious.

So where's the line between, well, that's fine.

That's normal anxiety.

And this is some sort of horrible anxiety.

So when it comes to any mental health diagnosis, this question of where is the line, the DSM, I think, does a pretty good job in answering this.

In every single section, they say if it leads to social, emotional, and occupational dysfunction.

So if you can't operate at your job, right, if it is causing all sorts of chaos in all of your relationships, from your friendships to your primary romantic relationship, if you're struggling just having kind of, you know, basic social interactions with people, then maybe it's reached a clinical level because it's all about pervasiveness and intensity and frequency.

And I think this is where people get confused and get lost in all this psycho-babble is because they say, oh, well, I feel...

afraid a lot and that's the formal definition of anxiety like a persistent fear that something bad might happen But, you know, if I'm, let's say at a party and I go and approach somebody I find attractive, I feel afraid.

And I'm a pretty confident person.

But just because like that fear is there, I don't know if that's net, I don't know if it has ever helped me to be like, oh, well.

I'm anxious around people that I like or I'm anxious in big crowds because then it kind of becomes part of my identity.

For me, it's always much more helpful to say like, wow, this person is really good looking.

I'm actually nervous to approach them.

I'm a little bit afraid, but you know what?

I'm also courageous.

I'm confident.

And if they don't like me, I'm going to be okay, you know, and then I go say hi.

And a lot of my friends will say, like, Joe, like, you know, you're, you're very charismatic or like, you're very confident, like, with strangers.

And I think they're often surprised to hear me tell them that.

It's like, no, like, I get really nervous.

I just think, you know, I'm really inspired by my work and the patients I treat sometimes for

a formal anxiety disorder.

They're convinced that the fear is so real that it's just going to end them.

And it never does.

That's something, it never does.

And I think that's something that we can, that's something that any of us can borrow, you know, from the people who do go to therapy for a mental health concern or condition is that if they can do it, you can do it for your normal emotions for sure.

So another thing you hear about, people will talk about their kids, their spouse, he has ADHD.

Everybody has ADHD.

That's why they can't focus.

They have ADHD.

I don't think everybody has ADHD.

So do you remember, Mike?

I think it was five to 10 years ago.

There were like documentaries on HPO and stuff about like the epidemic of overdiagnosis with ADHD and like the history of Adderall and how maybe it's not even, you know, a legitimate disorder.

And then.

all of the sudden kind of in this weird social media world we're living and now everyone has it and everyone's children has it and it's just kind of like when did it change You know, and I think that, so I have ADHD and people are often

not super pleased with me on my platforms when I call this out because I think it's, you know, when it's coming from inside the house, it's a little bit harder to ignore or to kind of brush off.

And I know that.

For me,

you know, I got diagnosed and, you know, I was able to have the testing psychologist.

They, you know, talk to my family.

Like, you know, they they did a really kind of in-depth history.

And I was able to see that a lot of these behaviors I was engaging for all my life were going unnoticed for one reason or another.

And it's really helped me have so much self-awareness and how my nervous system is just designed a little bit differently.

But the reason why I know it was the correct diagnosis is because when I am doing what I'm supposed to do, when I'm taking care of myself, and when I'm taking my medication, you would never know that I have it.

That is the proof in the pudding that the the diagnosis is helpful if it leads to a successful treatment plan.

It does seem there's a lot of self-diagnosis in mental health.

Like if you think you have a mental illness or some sort of mental whatever,

you could talk yourself into getting treatment because who's going to say you don't?

There was a study done.

I'm forgetting the name of it, but basically they sent a bunch of people into like an inpatient hospital.

This was many, many decades ago.

And they basically had them kind of fake their symptoms.

And they all got diagnosed, right?

They all got admitted.

Now,

to be fair, if you go into a hospital faking chest pain, you're going to get admitted, right?

Like, so like there is a certain level of like, well, you know, you can't necessarily.

I don't think you can put everything on the practitioner, but this is, again, why it's so important to be having these conversations

about all the psychological jargon and all the therapeutic language because people are coming into therapy having some crash course with you know Dr.

TikTok or Dr.

Google.

And a good therapist should know how to weed through all of that.

Well, I think what you said at the beginning is so, was so just rang a bell for me that people use a lot of this psycho babble

to get noticed, to be taken seriously.

I'm not just sad, I'm depressed.

Oh, well, that's a diagnosis.

Sadness is just you're sad.

Like that, that, so that then becomes normal.

And as you described, the definition keeps broadening.

So now everything's a problem and

people buy into it.

Yeah.

I think a lot of times people look at psychology or they look at the mental health field.

And they look at it,

it's a logical fallacy called an appeal to authority, where, you know, they

want

to be persuasive or they want to be convincing and if they say you know well like my ex was a selfish jerk it doesn't sting quite as hard as well my ex was a narcissist

right because it just brings it to this whole other level i mean a lot of us have acted like selfish jerks in our relationships i know i have particularly when i was younger and didn't have as much dating experience and and you know what i was allowed to grow and learn from that without you know getting a clinical label right of narcissism And sometimes I wonder if people are allowed to make mistakes like that anymore.

And anyone who says they've never made mistakes in dating, I think is just being completely disingenuous, but that's just my two cents.

Well, given how much we talk about mental health and we use those terms, those mental health terms, depressed, he's depressed, he's anxious, I think it's really important to get a professional perspective on this.

I've been talking with Joe Nucci.

He's a psychotherapist and author of the book, Psycho Babble, Viral Mental Health Myths and the Truths to Set You Free.

There's a link to his book in the show notes.

Joe, thank you for coming on and talking about all this.

Thanks so much for having me, Mike.

I appreciate it.

I've actually listened to some of the episodes before, so I was honored to get the connection.

You chose to hit play on this podcast today.

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When you think about the greatest inventions of the modern age, photography has to be very near the top of the list.

After all, today, we snap an astonishing 5 billion, 5 billion photos every single day.

But photography isn't just about capturing memories.

It has literally reshaped art, science, history, and how we see ourselves.

What's even more fascinating is the story of how it all began, a journey filled with brilliance, obsession, and even danger.

Joining me to explore that journey is Anika Burgess.

She's a writer and photo editor and author of the book Flashes of Brilliance, the genius of early photography and how it transformed art, science, and history.

Hi, Anika.

Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Thank you so much for having me, Mike.

You know, when people talk about the great inventions of the world, you know, you hear about, you know, the wheel and,

the printing press.

But photography, I mean, you don't have to think for very long or very hard about how photography has revolutionized the world.

It's remarkable.

And it's so interesting you should say that because there were several journals I read when I was researching my book that talked to put photography right next to electricity in terms of the marvels of the age.

And I think now it has become something that is so part of what we do.

It's in our pockets on our iPhones.

It's easy to forget just how miraculous photography really is.

Is there a generally agreed upon date, time, and person when the first picture was taken or developed, or that we know what the first photography was?

Yeah, there is, you know, and there is a little bit of debate around this.

But broadly speaking, a man called Louis Daguerre, a French scene painter, announced his new process called a daguerreotype, daguerreotype

to the world in 1839.

Now at the same time there was an Englishman also who had been experimenting with photography.

He had not announced his and so he suddenly had to hustle to get his invention out there.

But broadly speaking 1839 was the time in which the world first saw photography and were utterly amazed, baffled, dumbfounded by it.

If you read press reports, if you read accounts of people seeing a daguerreotype for the first time, they cannot believe what they're seeing.

And I've always wondered, like, when it was invented, the person who invented it probably had an idea of what it's for.

And sometimes those things turn out to be not what it's used for now.

What was the idea behind, like, if we make this work, then we can do what?

100%.

So Daguerre, as I said, was a scene painter and he specialized in making these very, very realistic paintings that he would put on fabric and then illuminate, but they weren't realistic enough, right?

So that was why he went to try to use a camera to sort of capture the world as it exists.

But when photography was first announced, the exposure times were too slow to be used for portraits.

So even though, you know, we just talked about how people love to take photographs of themselves and their friends and family, that very first initial year or two, you couldn't actually get your portrait taken because the exposure times were just simply too long to sit still.

So if you were going to have your picture taken back then, you just had to sit for like, well, I guess it depends on lighting and everything else.

But I mean, like generally, how long are we talking?

Great question.

So after photography was announced and people realized this could be a great way to take a photograph of a person, we'd want to be able to do that, there were some improvements to lenses and to chemicals.

And so by the early 1840s, exposure times varied a lot.

It could be anywhere between 20 seconds to 90 seconds.

And it depended, as you said, on weather, on time of day.

I mean, it's really astonishing the difference an exposure might be if you were in trying to do it in March versus doing it in October.

I even remember hearing that like when you look at old pictures, like pictures of old, the old West.

in the U.S., you know, no one's smiling.

And I've heard the explanation that no one could smile that long.

It would be uncomfortable to sit that long and smile.

But, you know, 30 seconds is not a long time to smile.

You know, it's interesting.

There is some guidance given on sitting for a portrait photograph because, as you can imagine, this was a completely new thing.

Nobody had done this before.

And there was guidance in regards to how to

position your face, what kind of clothes to wear.

And

the favorite advice that I read was that if you wanted to have your mouth be in a good expression, not looking too severe, but also looking suitably appealing for the camera, you needed to say the word prunes.

Prunes.

Prunes, yes.

Not cheese, prunes.

Well, but what happens if you blinked during that 20 seconds or 30 seconds?

I mean, then you were going to be in some trouble because, you know, the sitter, the subject of the photograph, had to be completely still.

You know, you had to put your hands in a certain position that would make sure that they were still.

Your head or neck was clamped in

a neck iron or a posing stand.

And so if you blinked, and if you blinked enough times, you would end up with a picture where your eyes looked as though they were closed or as though they were blurred, you know, because the camera could not capture movement at that time.

So this very first picture or the first pictures that this French guy took, if we were to look at them, Would we go, oh, that's a great picture?

Or, oh, that's a horrible picture or what an odd picture or what?

You know, I think it would depend a lot.

I think Daguerre's images himself, they're fascinating because they're so old.

And as I said,

the practice of daguerreotyping very quickly spread and proliferated.

And as with all things, you had very good practitioners and very, not very good practitioners.

So there are some daguerreotype portraits, and I actually own one, and they still look incredibly clear and sharp and beautiful.

And there are others where,

you know, the person looks very startled.

In fact, there was something I read, somebody wrote at the time that a bad Daguerrea type portrait looks like fried fish stuck to a silver plate.

Hmm.

Yummy.

Somewhat cruel.

Right.

And so what's the timeline then?

So this thing comes out and it's really cool and people say, oh, look at that.

But then what happens?

When does it catch on and how does it catch on and what's it used for?

And I know it's asking a lot in a short answer, but I want to get a sense of like the movement of this.

Of course.

Well, look, it caught on almost immediately.

Daguerre wrote a pamphlet that gave everybody guidance on how to use a daguerreotype.

It was a bestseller.

It was published in different languages around the world.

I mean, this is a really astonishing, world-breaking invention, as you mentioned in the intro.

And because I think people were really captivated by it, they started to experiment and innovate.

Is that even though we may look at early photography and potentially see portraits that are a little bit stiff-looking, it was actually a time of wonderful innovation.

And so, what happened was after the daguerreotype,

photographic processes continued to evolve to become easier to use, to become much faster exposure times.

And then, as the century wore on,

that meant that more and more people were able to practice photography and more and more different scenes began to be photographed.

To the point at which, by the 1890s, underwater photography was starting to

make really enormous strides.

And when you consider the 1890s, people were able to take a camera underwater at that point.

It is really astonishing.

And when did somebody figure out that we can take a picture, a photograph, and publish it in a newspaper or a magazine or something?

That certainly took longer because of the print technology at the time.

They used to use something called engraving, where an artist would use a wood cutting process to copy a picture.

And of course, in doing so, they may change certain details they didn't like.

So you couldn't say it had any real fidelity to the original image.

And it was really in the late 1880s and 1890s that printing technology caught up, basically, and was able to start reproducing photographs.

And I assume, one would assume, that these early photographs are all black and white.

There's no color in them, right?

That's right.

And, you know, that was really something that even though the daguerreotype was this astonishing process, the one thing that people thought was kind of a shame was the fact that it didn't reproduce color.

And it took 60 years or so to really get a viable color process.

It didn't didn't really happen until some experiments in the 1890s.

Of course, what people did do though, and they did this very quickly, was they actually painted color onto images as a way to keep customers happy.

You know, if there was a portrait where they felt they looked very flat in their black and white, people would paint on the color of their clothes or paint on some jewelry to just give the picture a little more life.

And at what point did

people start buying cameras to, you know, take at birthday parties and weddings and things?

When did that happen?

I mean, this is one of my favorite periods in photography, is when the technology improved to such a degree that small handheld cameras began to be used in the 1880s.

And this is, of course, when, as many people will know this name, the Kodak camera first came out.

And this is the point at which your amateur who had a little bit of income that they could spend on getting a camera could take those pictures to picnics or to holidays and then get get them sent off.

Somebody else would develop the film and the camera would come back to them loaded with new film.

I mean really it's like if you can remember going to a one-hour photo development store back in the days where we all used film or disposable cameras, you know, this was the really first iteration of that.

And when do you think people started to say, you know, This is an art form and we can do different things.

And this guy's really good at taking pictures.

He's so much better than this other guy.

Like you can do some really cool things with this rather than just take a picture.

Yes, and that happened pretty quickly, I have to say.

You know, even though photography was born from chemistry and optics, and even though many people said it was a mechanical device, a camera was simply to record the facts of the world as we see it.

By the 1850s, there were photographers who were trying to create scenes through image manipulation that were from their imagination, from their mind.

There's one very famous example, a man called Oscar Rejlander, who created an allegorical scene from, I think, more than 30 negatives that he cut and printed and put together into this enormous photograph.

And in his mind, the camera should not just be something that records what is existing in the world.

The camera can also be used to create scenes from the imagination, to create art.

And this may be surprising to hear, but there's a huge controversy about him doing that.

There were many people that felt if you have those artistic inclinations, you should pick up a paintbrush and do as traditional artists have done and leave photography to be a simple documentation method.

I would imagine another big milestone in the history of photography had to be flash photography.

Absolutely, it was.

And for a long time, photographers were really stymied by the weather.

You know,

they were beholden to whatever kind of light they could control in their studios.

That's why photo studios were often the top floors of buildings.

They would have skylights in the top.

The photographer had to have

systems of blinds and pulleys so they could control the amount of light coming in.

And even so, there are

a lot of experiments that took place to try and figure out ways to get artificial light.

Because you have to remember, you know, for the first many decades of photography, electricity was not around.

It was not in studios.

It was not in people's homes.

And so when flash photography was developed

with flash powder in the late 1880s,

it was

firstly terrific because people could finally be able to light scenes underground or at night, but it was also very, very dangerous because flash photography was effectively pyrotechnics.

It was combustible.

It was

incredibly risky to photographers and many injured themselves or died trying to light a photograph with flash powder.

Well, even I remember even later when there were like flash bulbs and flash cubes for home cameras, they were really hot after you tried to take, when you tried to take them out of the camera and put another one in, you could really burn your hands because those burn so hot real quick.

Absolutely.

I mean, just imagine that, but, you know, almost no,

no kind of

rules or regulations in regards to how the powders should be handled or mixed, which is what the situation was in that first decade or so of flash powder photography.

And this is something that comes up again and again in the early history of photography, is just how dangerous it could be.

And the chemicals that they were using to develop the pictures and all, I mean, those chemicals were dangerous, right?

Yes, they're chemicals in the dark rooms.

We're talking mercury.

We're talking cyanide in some cases.

And this is in a dark room, often with not very good ventilation.

I mean, the instances of photographers poisoning poisoning themselves or injuring themselves or getting very serious health issues because of the inhalation of these chemicals goes on and on and on for most of the 19th century.

So my sense is that when people took pictures early on, it was a one-at-a-time kind of thing.

You took a picture, then you had to stop and reset and do everything.

And then at some point came the role of film.

And that must have, that changed everything.

It did.

And, you know, that was what Kodak really ushered in, this idea that you had a role of film and that you could sort of shoot much more easily and more fluently than you're able to do before.

And I think it's really interesting to consider that and contrast it to what we have today.

If you're photographing with your iPhone, there is a limitless number of frames, of course, you can take and retake and retake and retake.

And I think, of course, there's benefits to be able to do that, but I certainly think that there is a deliberateness that must have come with reloading a slide, a glass plate negative every time you need to take a photograph that would have very much required a thoughtfulness.

So at some point, still photography became motion photography, motion pictures.

And when did that start and who started it?

I guess you could really argue that Edward Moybridge, who is a very famous motion photographer, I'm sure you'll know his work.

He took photographs of the horse in motion, you know, are all for horse's hooves off the ground when it runs, which began in the late 1870s.

So he sort of started with that process along with a French doctor who was trying to figure out the mechanics of movement.

You know, he was much more interested in the methodology behind how humans and animals move.

So it really started sort of 1870s

and really began to

take a hold of people's interest to the point at which in 1896 was when the first moving picture was screened to an audience in Paris.

Somehow,

don't I remember Thomas Edison's name being part of this conversation about movies?

Yep.

Absolutely.

He actually visited the French doctor in Paris to take a look at his work.

And he started something where it was an individual box that you would look into and you would see a picture in motion.

But it was really the cinematograph, which was brought about by the Lumiere brothers, that saw it in context of an audience and a screen and people watching together.

And the accounts of what that experience was like are wonderful.

People are just amazed and they could not believe what they were seeing that there was this

enlarged moving picture on the wall in front of them.

Yeah, you know, I've thought about when I go to like an IMAX theater or something, and it's just so like overwhelming.

And you wonder, like, if you could transport people from back then to see this, it would scare them to death.

I think think about that too sometimes.

And yes, I think it would too.

I think it would completely scare them.

And certainly based on the accounts of seeing that cinematograph, there was a very famous director.

Well, somebody who became a famous director at the time, of course, he wasn't yet a director because movies weren't really a thing.

But, you know, he went to this screening in 1896 and he recounted how everyone in the audience was just absolutely amazed and their mouths were just hanging open at what they were seeing.

Talk about early aerial photography, getting the camera in the air.

It's not something people think much about today because we have airplanes, but we didn't then.

Early, early on, photographers were keen to try to get the camera into the air because it is a perspective that we humans cannot have.

We do not have it naturally.

And there were many ways in which photographers tried to get the camera airborne because, again, of course, this is pre-airplanes.

There's accounts of photographers not only bringing their cameras into gas balloons, but also attaching them to kites, attaching them to rockets.

And my favorite example is a pharmacist who created a very miniature camera for a pigeon to wear, and it was automatically firing so that we would get a real pigeon's eye view of the world.

When people started having their pictures developed, like you used to take them to Photomat or the drugstore or whatever, and then wait a day or two or a week and get them back.

Like, who was doing that?

Where did they go?

Where did the film go?

Where did

Well, in the case of Kodak, they actually sent it back to the Eastman Kodak headquarters in Rochester, where there was a factory, and people would take on the cameras and develop the film there on the spot and then send it back to them.

Obviously, that developed over time, pardon the pun, so that now, you know, your local camera store, and I have one near me, will have the facilities to do that on the spot.

And obviously, they don't use the same chemicals that were used in the 19th century either, fortunately.

With the exception, I have to say, of one chemical, the fixing chemical, commonly known as hypo, that was proposed from the very earliest days of photography, 1839, and it is still used today.

You'll still find it in a dark room today to develop film.

But at the end of the day, a picture is still a picture.

I mean, it's just the same as it was when it first started.

You point the camera at someone or something,

you take the picture, and there it is.

And that

never changes.

That's absolutely right.

And you know what else doesn't change?

It's the idea that people are concerned with how they look in pictures.

This came up in the earliest decades of portraiture.

People were worried about what to wear, or they felt that the photograph didn't do themselves justice.

There's cases of customers suing photographers because of bad portraits, because they felt like they were not done proper justice in their portraits.

So this, I guess you could call it human vanity, is consistent throughout time.

Well, it exists.

I mean, I see pictures of myself and think, I don't look like that.

Well, that's horrible.

That's terrible.

Well, you know,

back when photography was first coming into its own and people were getting their portraits taken to help keep their customers happy, photographers would also use image manipulation for flattery.

So they may improve a person's appearance with retouching after the portrait was taken just so that the customer would feel that they looked better.

Well, talk about a topic that touches us every day.

I mean, we're either

taking a picture or someone's pointing a camera at us or we're seeing pictures that someone else took.

I mean, photography is a big part of our life, and it's great to get the backstory of how it all started.

I've been talking with Anika Burgess.

She is a photo editor and author of the book Flashes of Brilliance: The Genius of Early Photography and How It Transformed Art, Science, and History.

And there's a link to her book in the show notes.

Anika, thank you for telling that story.

Thanks so much for having me, Mike.

I've really enjoyed our conversation.

if you do laundry I bet this has happened to you you take out a load of laundry and you find a bleach stain on something usually it's a towel even though you never used bleach when you did the laundry so where did the bleach stain come from well interestingly it most likely came from something in your bathroom for example whitening toothpaste acne medication hydrogen peroxide any product that claims to whiten brighten or disinfect.

So after you brush your teeth, if you wipe your face on a towel, the toothpaste on your face can bleach that spot on the towel.

If you get it on your hands, then wipe your hands on the towel, or if it splashes onto your clothes, you will get a bleach stain.

So the trick is to treat those products as if they are bleach and wash your hands after using them and be careful not to get them on your clothes.

or your towels.

And that is something you should know.

The best way to support this podcast is very simple.

Just tell someone you know, maybe tell a couple of people you know about it, and tell them to listen.

Ask them.

Say,

I'd really think you'd enjoy this.

And that helps us grow our audience, and that helps us keep going.

I'm Mike Carruthers.

Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

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However, my one true love remains all things spooky, and I'm excited to say there's a new season of my horror podcast Undertow.

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Here's a sample from the first episode about a man who returns to the house he grew up in after receiving a creepy voicemail from his mother.

Let's hear it, shall we?

Mike, help me.

I'm not alone in here.

I'm not alone.

She's just walking.

She's walking toward me.

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