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River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West
The world as we know it today began in California in the late 1800s, and Eadweard Muybridge had a lot to do with it. This striking assertion is at the heart of Rebecca Solnits new book, which weaves together biography, history, and fascinating insights into art and technology to create a boldly original portrait of America on the threshold of modernity. The story of Muybr...more
Paperback, 320 pages
Published
March 2nd 2004
by Penguin (Non-Classics)
(first published 2003)
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Eric
rated it
Shelves:
photography,
history,
americans,
westward-ho,
malick-should-film-it,
favorites,
criticism,
shouldreread,
travels
Finally found the pictures I mention!
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Out west, the complex responses to industrialization and its transformation of time and space include things never dealt with by the impressionist painters and avant-garde poets usually talked of as modernist, include Indian wars and identity shifts, a landscape being claimed and renamed, photography as art, and a comic literature.
Rebecca Solnit doesn’t explicitly oppose the history of San Francisco to Walter Benjamin...more
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Out west, the complex responses to industrialization and its transformation of time and space include things never dealt with by the impressionist painters and avant-garde poets usually talked of as modernist, include Indian wars and identity shifts, a landscape being claimed and renamed, photography as art, and a comic literature.
Rebecca Solnit doesn’t explicitly oppose the history of San Francisco to Walter Benjamin...more
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"the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life" is the author's own description of Muybridge's time. The Victorian era was a phenomena and I cannot adequately imagine what everyday life was like in a time that stop action photography, the telegraph, the train (among other innovations) became reality, but that description certainly helps.
Solnit is a modern writer and sees the world from her own time, but is also able to give you the historical persp...more
Solnit is a modern writer and sees the world from her own time, but is also able to give you the historical persp...more
The reviews on this site have it about accurate, though they may value Solnit's speculations about the twin cultures of technology and film, for which Muybridge and California Victoriana are viewed as responsible, slightly more than I do. (I prefer her book about California painters of the post-war period.) She is of course not the first to connect tech history with the film industry; similarly, her work on Muybridge is indebted to scholars to whom I can't find all that much of her book's value...more
A look at the cultural history of a pivotal period in American history: then entry of railroads into the west, and the beginning of the widespread use of photographs, among other things. Lots of interesting info about that very original guy Muybridge, too; he was atypical enough, and also enough a product of his times, that it provides some tension to the story. But most of the tension comes from the very real unease of cultural change, and competing strands of life. I'm not expressing this very...more
Fantastic, compelling book. Solnit makes a strong case for Muybridge's motion studies as a "pivot point" in history. She lays out the connections between development of the railroad, telegraph communication and photography, which all functioned as "space and time annihilating" technologies. The sweeping narrative touches on the expansion of the west, the Indian wars, the history of photography and cinema, Muybridge's professional and personal life, ghost dances, railroad baro...more
It's a wonderful thesis that Solnit crafts here - Muybridge as a lens to view the dual cultures birthed in California in the 1800s - technology and the film industry. For the most part, Solnit succeeds in linking the two, but the book flags a bit in pacing toward the end, perhaps due to the mixed success of Muybridge's continued photographic explorations. Reflective of the age that was to come, Muybridge rode the wave as long as he could, and was drowned out by other voices with deeper pockets...more
Rebecca Solnit blew me away with this book. I came to her work after reading the excellent piece she did in Harpers in July. Here she presents a prismatic study of Eadweard Muybridge, the man who did more than any other to invent the instantaneous photograph, proving conclusively that a horse lifted all four hooves from the ground while running. At the behest of Leland Stanford, he would go on to do hundreds of pioneering studies of various animals in motion, including humans, revolutionizing ou...more
It's not so much a biography as a description of a historical moment, when, the author would have us believe, our species changed in fundamental ways. Time stops and speeds up. Distance collapses into almost nothing. The very acts of seeing, doing, remembering, and being in a place take on new dimensions. Hilarity ensues.
Solnit overwrites a little, but she's clearly a fine researcher, and a good Americanist. Not only do I now know more about Muybridge than is probably necessary to ge...more
Solnit overwrites a little, but she's clearly a fine researcher, and a good Americanist. Not only do I now know more about Muybridge than is probably necessary to ge...more
Solnit is a remarkable prose stylist, and her examination of the brave new world of abstractions and representations born in California's violent industrializing Gilded Age past works marvelously. I will even defend her occasionally tendency to wind off into tangled thickets of near schizoid conspiracism about the connections between the various phenomena she investigates with the careful eye of a social historian. Sometimes wild theorizing about the bigger picture is exactly what the doctor ord...more
"...They flocked to see the Diorama imitating a nearby church they could have visited in actuality for free. This is one of the great enigmas of modern life: why the representation of a thing can fascinate those who would ignore the original."
What I would call an impressionist biography of Muybridge—with as much attention given to the background of things he experienced only indirectly as those which were of primary importance. Solnit succeeds in conveying the rapidity and ...more
What I would call an impressionist biography of Muybridge—with as much attention given to the background of things he experienced only indirectly as those which were of primary importance. Solnit succeeds in conveying the rapidity and ...more
Mostly, writers who know railroad history don't know anything else; Solnit knows how to connect it to stop-motion photography and Stanford University and the Modoc war, and the connections aren't forced but persuasively coherent. I'm a one-time San Francisco railroader and I think this is a really terrific book.
Overall a great lense on Muybridge's life and work. Solnit focuses on how Muybridge helped change the way we exist in the world today, connecting him to the railroads, Sitting Bull, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the state of California (among many many other things). Despite the complicated web of connections, for most of the book she exibits enough restraint to maintain the central narrative and keep it from becoming too unweildy. There's a sense that in the last chapter she gives up on that r...more
A very good book about an incredible photographer (it always amazed me how he was found not guilty for murdering his wife's lover, but it makes sense [sort of:] when you read it here). Putting his life in its proper context gets a bit tedious at times and Solnit's own opinions are sometimes a little over the top (I'm not sure it was that important to include a discussion about "Star Trek" at the end[!:]), but the book is definitely worth reading nevertheless...
Great Book. I really like Rebecca Solnit generally.
great storytelling, great history. interesting setting she creates to discuss Muybridge and Stanford, but also the times in which they were doing what they were doing.
great storytelling, great history. interesting setting she creates to discuss Muybridge and Stanford, but also the times in which they were doing what they were doing.
Some very valid ideas linked together through extraneous melodrama and pointless connections. Could have been a 150 page tour de force. Overthinking to the max, unfortunately.
Spiros
rated it
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review of another edition
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review of another edition
Recommends it for:
anyone who wonders whether one can step in the same river twice
A lovely meditaion on the nature of time, and how our perception of time as well as distance was irretrievably altered by the technological advances of 19th century: the railroad, the telegraph, and photography. Muybridge's career stages reflected three types of time: his Yosemite views recorded geologic time, his coverage of the Modoc War in Califonia's northeastern region documented the clash of industrial with preindustrial time, his panoramas of San Francisco showed the results of industrial...more
A fascinating book about the development of the west. Especially interesting as I live in Palo Alto where Muybridge did the first motion studies.
I'm not sure I actually read this. I looked at all the pictures and captions. I read the introduction and most of the footnotes. I skimmed several chapters. I got onto Wikipedia and read Muybridge's entry. I bought into the thesis: that the strange singularity of California produced both Hollywood and Silicone Valley, and that these places and concepts were in place well before the 19th century was over, and that they changed our world forever. But I didn't actually READ this book. It was too mu...more
Jean
is currently reading it
Thus far, good. I like Rebecca Solnit's writing style, it's captivating. More on this when I finish.
She's probably the most fascinating nonfiction writer out there. Relentlessly fascinating.
Even technological pioneers are left behind when they ignore new technologies. (Even when those technologies are a direct result of their own work.)
Megan
added it
currently overdue from the library as I am determined to finish! It is a wonderful overview of history as well as a fascinating tale of a fascinating individual. Esp. liked her treatment of changing perceptions of time and distance with the advent of the railway.
Great book. The author shows how industrialization changed perception of time, place, and authenticity. By examining Muybridge's life (pioneer of motion pictures) and the rise of the railroads/industrialization, you get: passages on the weirdness of stopping time; the weirdness of duplicating life outside of life; the destruction of distance, place, and homeland (the Native Americans); the speeding up and regimentation of time through industrialization, and the accompanying speeding up of natu...more
Felt like I was reading something for a history class - took me back a few decades.
cultural theory
4.4 Solnit is a master, weaving the major themes of an era from the strands of personal lives. Beautifully written, elegantly thought through, a wonderful biography of the photographer at the center of the changing West. Worth it for the Ghost Dance.
What strikes me about Rebecca Solnit's writing is her ability to come off as a modest writer, one who is trying to "figure out" her books, her storylines, her history, right alongside the reader, but at the same time, is rich with research and knowledge about her topics. The intelligence oozes through, but never once does her writing read as showy or grandiose -- it is simply engaging, thought-provoking, involved stuff. More than worthwhile, it is necessary.
I really like the author's narrative style. She has a way of bringing in the right amount of context and then bringing it back to the original subject.
A very good book by one of my favorite authors. Not quite the same beautiful writing as with A Field Guide to Getting Lost and some of her others. However, the life of Muybridge is fascinating (he kills the man who his wife cheats on him with and gets off!) and Solnit tells his story well. As ever, she is pulling together seemingly disparate themes and weaving them together seamlessly.
This book has officially hooked me on Solnit. She's my new Joan Didion.
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Rebecca Solnit (b. 1961) is the author of numerous books, including Hope in the Dark, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. In 2003, she received the prestigious Lannan Literary Award.
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“What distinguishes a technological world is that the terms of nature are obscured; one need not live quite in the present or the local.”
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