Rebecca Solnit

A survey of the historical contributions of Eadweard Muybridge documents his role in filmmaking technology and as a war photographer before standing trial for the murder of his wife's lover, tracing how his life reflected America in the nineteenth century. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West

River of Shadows

Bryan Alexander

River of Shadows is an imaginative look at the origins of modernity. Its main focus is the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, best known for inventing the motion study method of breaking down rapid motion into viewable scenes. Rebecca Solnit uses Muybridge's biography to explore great themes of modernity's emergence: the reduction of space, the recreation of time, the destruction of nature, speed's rapid acceleration, the rise of giant figures, and the defeats of many. 

The biography nicely balances the grandeur of these big ideas. Muybridge and the time are about huge creations and terrible losses. Despite its subject's globe-trotting range, River focuses on California's role in these grand themes, ultimately settling on Muybridge as a kind of godfather to Hollywood and Silicon Valley. As Solnit puts it, "Muybridge was photographing the journey to modernization" (122).

River is, simply put, a pleasure to read. Solnit's style is elegant, often direct, yet also lyrical and witty. "As a young man [Leland Stanford] had the smoldering good looks of a stage villain, but as he became stouter, he came to look like a badly taxidermized badger." (69) Solnit can sweep together concepts into intriguing, even pithy syntheses, as in:
Cinema can be imagined as a hybrid of railroad and photography, an outgrowth of these two definitive nineteenth century inventions... (219)
What Europeans and European Americans had lost gradually as the Industrial Revolution loosened their ties to earthly place and celestial time, Native Americans would lose suddenly, as war took them away from familiar places and ancient practices... (110)
In other words, cinema would itself be a kind of Ghost Dance... The Ghost Dance itself was an effort to make time run backward like a film, so the whites vanished, the game reappeared, even death reversed itself. (115-6)
In earlier times racers, human and equine, only competed against each other, but by the late nineteenth century they matched their bodies to ideas and records: they raced the clock. (77)

Her voice races across subjects, or pauses to think hard about one item, with equal power. The opening chapter repeats several phrases as if in wonder or ritual, summoning up the topic and the intellect to master it.

The physical book is also a treat. It's nicely stocked with photographs, which isn't a trivial matter when some require unusual layout, like the grand San Francisco panorama. A little flip-book of Muybridge running in the nude decorates the opening chapter. 

The book relies on several excellent set pieces, such as the Modoc War (1872-3), the sad story of Muybridge's wife and lover (he killer the latter, but evaded hanging by reason of insanity), and the exploration and defense of Yosemite. Each of those stands alone as a powerful essay. Together they give context or depth to the book's biographical subject.

Considered as a nonfiction book, River instructed me very well. I have never lived on the West coast, nor do I know its history in detail, so the California decades were fascinating to me. My knowledge of photography and film history received a fine expansion here. Solnit's major themes appeal to me, and were fairly persuasive.

So what's not to like?
First, the survey of technology is curiously narrow. Solnit dives deeply into photography and, to a lesser extent, the railroad, but leaves out equally powerful contemporary inventions: the telegraph, the gramaphone, the telephone. Each of these would add wonderfully to her argument. I can see excluding them for reasons of space, but I think a writer of Solnit's capabilities could have done something with each, or at least justified leaving them off.
Second, Solnit raises a terrific subject, the combination of railroad strikes, native American rebellion, and social panic in 1877, but gives them unusually short shrift. There's a hint of possibility when the book connects Muybridge's time studies to Taylorism (212); that's the kind of path I wish River has followed.
Third, the concluding chapter brings the book's themes fully into the present, but shortchanges the digital world. Solnit offers uncharacteristically flat observations ("war American-style is a lot like video games", the internet as an "everywhere that more and more becomes nowhere", 254). Cyberspace offers few delights and less intellectual interest to her, beyond the empire of Silicon Valley. 
Fourth, and this is not the writer's fault, the index is too basic. Many key terms from the book don't appear.

But forget those criticisms until you finish the book. Grab a copy and dive in. 

Some intriguing details: 
"Photographers sometimes scraped the [glass] plates clean to start over, and many of the negatives of the Civil War were recycled into greenhouse plates without being scraped, their images of the harvest of death gradually fading away to let more and more light in on the orchids or cucumbers beneath." (36)

"While recuperating in England and receiving treatment from Sir William Gull..." (38) Now that could make a fun Jack the Ripper story, if you accept Gull as Jack.

"A technology is a practice, a technique, or a device for altering the world or the experience of the world." (114) Pretty close to Crowley's definition of magick.

River of Shadows Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West

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