Revelations takes its title from a shift in what a photograph could show. When X-ray plates, photomicrographs and experimental high-speed exposures first circulated, they described a world no unaided eye could verify: the interior of a body, the structure of a wing in motion, forms too small or too fast to register. Edited by Ben Burbridge and published by MACK in 2015, the book gathers that material and asks what it did to photography afterward.

Its sources are institutional and plural. Images come from the National Collections held in Bradford and London, along with further international holdings, and the volume presents scientific and artistic photographs drawn from many archives rather than the work of a single author. Burbridge’s role is editorial; photographs, book spreads and other documents are arranged into an argument rather than a portfolio.

That argument concerns influence as much as origin. Early scientific imagery, as the publisher describes it, revealed formal possibilities to artists and spoke to them in plain terms about a changing relationship between people, science and technology. The sequencing follows those lines into modern and contemporary art, so a reader moves from laboratory plates to the uses artists later made of them.

Issued alongside a major exhibition, the book reads as a companion rather than a checklist of objects. The inclusion of spreads and documents makes it a study of how such images were published, circulated and looked at, not only of what they depict. For a collector, its interest lies in that double function: an anthology of early material still unfamiliar to many, and a reinterpretation of the visual field photography claimed for itself. The debossed hardback remains a considered point of reference on a subject exhibitions and scholarship continue to revisit.