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A new series written and read by Laura Cumming explores the exciting nineteenth century revolution in photography. Today, Alphonse Bertillon and his camera create a crime solving innovation.

In Speed of Light, Cumming takes us on an exhilarating journey through the early years of photography, a revolutionary technology that changed the way we see ourselves forever. From Daguerre’s first patent, in 1839, this art hurtles forward at unbelievable speed - from close-up to collage, snapshot to montage, mugshot, news photography and more, all within two or three decades. To tell the story, Cumming delves into the lives of five ground-breaking photographers whose innovations transformed the medium, leaving us with some of the most affecting images ever made.

The series opens with Alexander Gardner, the Scottish photographer who became an eyewitness to the American Civil War. Gardner's haunting images, including his iconic photograph of Abraham Lincoln just days before his assassination - "the moment when the President became a legend’ as Cumming puts it - offer a deeply human insight into living history. Another Scot, William Notman, sails from Glasgow to Canada to open the nation’s most celebrated studio. Here he invents ingenious ways to depict hundreds of people – together - in the snow and ice, and to bring the outside, as it were, indoors. In London, John Jabez Mayall takes the only known photograph of the painter, JMW Turner, as well as the first and most significant photographs of Charles Dickens and Karl Marx. Mayall also captures the spirit of democracy with his carte de visites – pocket sized photographs - that anyone could buy of the stars of the day, from Wilkie Collins to Queen Victoria. And in Paris the meticulous police officer Alphonse Bertillon invents the front-and-profile mugshot that is still used in the solving of crime today. Last comes Nadar, renowned for capturing the innermost thoughts of his Parisian sitters, who took the first aerial shots, and the first revolving shots, and put interviews with images for the first time, reaching forward to the advent of film and television.

Laura Cumming is Chief Art Critic of The Observer. Thunderclap, her memoir of art, life and sudden death, was shortlisted for The Women’s Prize and won The Writer’s Prize and The Saltire Book of the Year Award in 2024. The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velazquez won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography in 2017. On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Person was a Sunday Times bestseller and Radio 4 Book of the Week.

Produced by Elizabeth Allard