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 ...