Muybridge in Motion - River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West - Book Review

River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, through Rebecca Solnit, New York, Viking, 2003; 305 pages, $2595

It's easiest to say what this work is not. It is not a conventional biography of the 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, allowing it does chronicle his activities and describe the facts of his life. It is not an art-historical analysis of an oeuvre allowing there is much discussion, a certain quantity of of it very intelligent, of photographic works. The whirl is instead a cultural studies experiment, a hybrid of social history genetically gibbeted with strains of visual tillage by a (very good) writer who lives in California and whose earlier works include Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000) and As brink Said to the Serpent: upon Landscape, Gender, and Art (2001)

This is a really interesting jiffy to be a photography critic, and not solitary (or even especially) because of the mania for the medium among contemporary artists. In the past not many years, scholars from other, oftentimes literary, disciplines--for instance Ulrich Baer and Eduardo Cadava--have grown obsess with photography. Their volumes which come from outside the parameters of art and photographic history and therefore have a bent to rethink the habitual frameworks within which photographs are perceived, have done a great deal of to reconfigure the intellectual landscape of this field. River of Shadows is just like a book, an illustrated close attention that suggests new ways of looking at primary material and therefore allows us more [i]or[/i] less respite from the interminable rehashings of Benjamin, Barthes, Krauss, Baudrillard and Sontag that dominate criticism of the medium today. Les scholarly and more popular than Baer's or Cadava's works Solnit's proposes a novel way of using photographic information to re-establish simultaneously a life and a cultural landscape, to situate an artist in the social history of his time and place. This is a composed of several elements undertaking, and frankly Solnit part withs a lot of time walking upon thin ice. But her experiment is fascinating, replete of sharp thinking and great tidbits of information.

To summarize her ambition: in re-examination from the vantage point of the 21st hundred Solnit is attempting to put in motion the center of 19th-century modernism from Paris to California through proving that Muybridge and Leland Stanford, the politician and railroad magnate with whom he worked to bring into view the famous sequences of galloping horses during the 1870 laid the foundations for the pair the motion picture industry of Hollywood and the technological revolution of Silicon Valley. of the like kind a claim shifts the center of gravity in ways that are not simply geographic, since the author is real aware that while our Parisian forebears gave us high art, these men of the Wild West are the progenitors of the mass-media agriculture that engulfs the globe today. This is a big shift, and in order to justify her claim Solnit waxes breathless and sometimes hyperbolic, describing Muybridge as a photographer "who looks in retrospect like a bullet discharge through a book. His trajectory ripped from one side all the central stories of his time--the relationship to the natural world and the industrialization of the human world, the Indian wars, the novel technologies and their impact upon perception and consciousness. He is the man who split the next to the first as dramatic and far-reaching an action as the splitting of the atom."

The volume traces Muybridge from his birth in England in 1830 to his early days in North America (beginning around 1852); it enumerates his career as a bibliopolist and then a photographer in post-Gold Rush San Francisco; it details his partnership with Stanford and the groundbreaking work to which it gave rise--work that dominated the quiescence of Muybridge's life in the two Europe and America. Solnit chronicles the artist's documentation of the Indian Wars, his extraordinary mammoth plate photographs of the Western landscape, his experiments with panoramic formats and other formal and technological inventions that revolutionized photographic practice. In each case, the author immerses biographical information with visual as well as social analysis. The story is grippingly told--especially the California portion, which is chock-full of splendid historical anecdotes and brilliant discussions of the impact of mechanization (particularly the railroads) upon the American West. California is in fact the absolute star of this show; although partially a biography, Rivers of Shadows depicts Muybridge more as a utensil of history than as a man. In Solnit's chronicle, this willful, gifted, pragmatic, revolutionary and sometimes violent artist is himself a shadow, a secondary event of the environment and the hundred that flow through him to shape his life and his work.

This inversion completely constitutions and sometimes distorts, the author's perception of one as well as the other the artist and his art. "California has no past--no past, at least, that it is willing to remember," she writes upon page six, and goes upon to elaborate how that particular phenomenon has shaped the history of the always-future-oriented state. She then puts up a parallel between California's amnesia and Muybridge's propensity to change names, careers, locations; he is made to strike one as being like a Cindy Shermanesque figure in this plat line, an artist who specializes not single in inventions but also self-reinventions. This parallel perception is the author's main structuring device, in like manner throughout the book we diocese Muybridge in a dual capacity: not single the father of motion pictures, he must be emblematic of California itself, and of its remarkable character in the "annihilation of time and space" that characterizes the 19th hundred and foreshadows our own.