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River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West

Rebecca Solnit

4.16 · Rating details · 1,315 ratings · 153 reviews

The world as we know it today began in California in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This extraordinary assertion is at the heart of Rebecca Solnit's brilliant new work of cultural history. Weaving together biography, history, and fascinating insights into art, technology, landscape, and philosophy, Solnit has created a boldly original portrait of America on th ...more

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Hardcover, 320 pages

Published January 27th 2003 by Viking Adult (first published 2003)

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Jun 09, 2009 Eric rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: photography, shouldreread, history, malick-should-film-it, criticism, americans, westward-ho, travels

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’s characterization of Paris as “capitol of the nineteenth century” (Baudelair ...more

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Mar 05, 2012 Geoff rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommended to Geoff by: Eric

I left the theater after my second viewing of The Master last night with Muybridge on my mind. There are many reasons for this. One might be that The Master was being shown in 70mm, it’s the first film I’ve seen in that resolution, and it is magnificently sharp, with bright, vivid, and subtle coloring, more expansive sound. It is the next advance in the medium that Eadweard Muybridge helped to inspire over 150 years ago. I am far removed from that time, but I’m living in a sensory world that has I left the theater after my second viewing of The Master last night with Muybridge on my mind. There are many reasons for this. One might be that The Master was being shown in 70mm, it’s the first film I’ve seen in that resolution, and it is magnificently sharp, with bright, vivid, and subtle coloring, more expansive sound. It is the next advance in the medium that Eadweard Muybridge helped to inspire over 150 years ago. I am far removed from that time, but I’m living in a sensory world that has been in a startling way determined and delineated by the reverberations of what Muybridge accomplished- making time stand still on a portable medium and then developing ways to reanimate it, dismantling and reconstructing time and space as to know them better. This process began in the middle of the 19th century by taking a picture of a horse. The result is someone like me walking dreamily out of a movie theater in 2012, my head full of someone else’s visions, dreaming someone else’s dream, considering a world through multiple layers of lenses. Another reason Muybridge was so much in my thoughts last night is that scene near the beginning of The Master where Freddie Quell wanders onto the docks in San Francisco bay and stows away on Lancaster Dodd’s boat, and the boat drifts Westward out toward the setting sun on the oneiric lilt of the waves, under a light-strung Golden Gate Bridge. It’s an hallucinatory scene. Muybridge once took a photo of himself from around the same vantage point, gazing out across the Golden Gate, before the bridge was built. The light in that photograph was hallucinatory as well, as I suppose light considered as an object always is; the bay became a luminescent white plain and the mountains dark, angular, high-contrast forms in the distance. Muybridge himself is situated near the middle of the frame, his back turned to the camera, but is almost lost among the bramble and stone- an observing object fused with the landscape.

”What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.”
-Jean Baudrillard

When Baudrillard started coming to California in the 1970’s to seek out “the capital of postmodernism” there is something he missed entirely: that modernity, that spectacle, that artifice and illusion, cultural amnesia, life as representation, that hyper-violence and hyper-reality had existed in that place for at least a century. So argues Solnit in her long, digressive essay on Muybridge. If modernism in art is meant to show and engage a particular alienation that human beings experience in relation to the industrialized world, then a kind of modernism certainly arose in fascinating ways in California during the middle of the 19th century. Modernism is not only those European impressionists playing with how objects are rendered on a canvas, or Rodin’s figures sculpted in weighty, sorrowful forms, or Flaubert and Baudelaire and Nerval approaching a new literature that did away with Romanticism and redefined Realism. Modernism is also economics, labor, technology, new ways of waging war, architecture, the altered cityscape, the idea of nature as something separate from mankind. While the high art of Europe was transmuting the classical world into new languages, America was creating its own style of modernism, one that displayed itself not on museum walls but on the very land, one that created the first corporations and millionaires, that gridded the continent with railroad tracks and consumed forests and bison and native populations as if they were fuel for a monstrous smelting furnace. Technological modernism is the real legacy of the Wild West; the cowboy stories and Indian legends and vast unsettled Edens are the mythology, the preferred remembrance, the whitewashed history that only exists in images and narratives- films. New dominant forms of technological representation and fiction are the true children of California.

That the information-saturated reality we wade through today is a mode of existence created by the products of Silicon Valley is inarguable; also inarguable is that Silicon Valley had its origins in Leland Stanford’s wealth and hubris. Leland Stanford made his fortune in ruthless competition building the first transcontinental railroad. He also funded the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge. At the very beginning of American modernism, which is also to say in the very last days of the old world and the dying old modes of life, were the dual forces of money and industry, remaking the land, remaking time and space and our experiences relative to them. The new world takes root and is born in the senses, in perception. Solnit’s thesis is that the first signs of this shift in perception can be traced back to the concurrent development of three technologies- the railroad, the telegraph, and photography. The railroad and the telegraph worked to annihilate space and time and shrink the size of the Earth by increasing the speed of travel, commerce, communication. In doing so, they also began delocalizing experience, making the landscape uniform, eliminating particularities of place that were for centuries determined by the limited capabilities of the transit of resources and information. These changes in commerce led inevitably to another, more profound and broad change in Time. Time had to be made uniform between greatly separated places to sync up the new forms of trade. Before the railroad and the telegraph and the factory, it was seasons and the amount of daylight, the ringing of church bells, that determined the way time was comprehended. It wasn't until a person in Philadelphia could communicate instantly with a person in California that it became necessary to synchronize clocks. It wasn't until a train load of timber coming from the Midwest had to be met at a station in New York City at a specific hour that people had to standardize time. So we descend from watching seasons and months to weeks and days on down to fractions of seconds, and with it limn the workday, the meeting promptly at 10 am, and the idea of someone being “late to work” and facing punishment for the infraction, the intrusion of strictly regulated and monitored time into lives unacquainted with such a thing, and that new Time largely being determined by the requirements of the money-making machines of the new industries.

"His [Muybridge's] was part of the anxiety of an age shifting its rhythms from those of the heavens to those of the machine."(pg. 61)

The third development, photography, plays a stranger and more ambiguous role in the 19th century’s changing perception of space-time. A product of the same forward thrust in technological innovation, it stands somewhere indistinct between a science, an art, and a commodity. It engenders new ideas about time and space and humanity’s relation to those things, but it also fragments and makes those observations both less and more real; it answers so many questions but raises so many more. A photograph is necessarily a lie, but it is a more accurate reproduction of a scene than what our memories can supply. Photographs divide and chop up and scatter time, make time portable, allow the dead to live, allow time to stand still, allow a single event to be revisited endlessly. A photograph determines facts while muddling them, ennobles as well as degrades the bodies that are its subject, replaces and supplants what it represents. The paradox of the represented image is that the more ever present and vivid it becomes, the less the source of the representation seems to matter or even exist outside of its depiction, and the image comes to speak of a reality with more force than the reality the image contains. Thus Solnit's idea that in our modern age we are more than ever those people raised in Plato's cave, confusing shadows with the world.

Questions such as these didn't exist for people in the early 1800’s. Straddling the pre- and post-technologically representational worlds is Muybridge and his team of scientist-artists. From early on in his career Muybridge was interested in the photographic medium as a way of capturing the ephemeral, and even his mammoth-plate landscapes of Yosemite, considered among the finest ever produced, would often focus on such transient things as water in various states of motion, the mutability of clouds, the debris of landslides, the slow migration of glaciers. Even then it was as if he sensed that the photograph could grasp at something beyond the limits of our perceptions. Muybridge’s motion studies, funded by Stanford, were the first instances of photography moving faster than the eye, of photography amplifying the capability of our senses, revealing “those immaterial events of which time itself is made.” The motion studies of horses and other animals were scientific gestures. When he began reassembling those images into sequences and animating them with his zoopraxiscopes and magic lantern slides he was taking that science into the realms of art. Edison and the Lumiere brothers and a handful of others made the final steps toward cinema, but in the 1880’s Muybridge met with Edison and discussed the motion studies and ideas of combining his magic lantern shows with Edison’s phonograph- the merging of moving pictures and sound- the fundamentals of cinema, and when merged with the transmissive properties of the telegraph, the essentials of what were to become computers. One can see in the Stanford/Muybridge collaboration, in latent form, a large swath of the features that would come to define America in the 20th and 21st centuries: vast wealth funding discovery with both brilliant and tragic results, faith in material progress as a saving grace and our inexorable trajectory toward a technological civilization, the fragmenting of time and space into more abstract and complex and alienating notions, the simultaneous shrinking and decentering of the world, the “everywhere that is nowhere” of the information age.

I didn’t speak at all here of the particularities of Muybridge’s biography, the accident that may have caused damage to part of his brain and spurred his career onto unprecedented creative achievements, his involvement in the Indian wars, the murder he committed, his travels far across the United States and Europe, the triumphs and failures of his shadowy, later years. For these I direct you to Eric's wonderful review of this book, which he has been kind enough to punctuate with a number of Muybridge’s pictures, and of course to Solnit’s remarkable study itself.
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Dec 26, 2011 Reenie rated it liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, female-author

This book is interesting, although at times that fact was almost obscured by the writing style, which has a recurring tendency to extremely florid prose. Isn't it odd how these days fiction writers generally avoid anything floral or lengthy in description to avoid being 'purple' or Victorian, while non-fiction writers can get away with writing sentences that would make a Bronte sister roll her eyes? Not that they always do it, but the mystical floralness does crop up more often, and at least for ...more

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Oct 25, 2010 Jeff rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: documentary-narrative, california-subcult, 311-312

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

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Feb 02, 2009 Christine rated it really liked it · review of another edition

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. ...more

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Jan 13, 2014 Edward rated it really liked it · review of another edition

If you think of Eadweard Muybridge at all, you probably remember him as an obscure l9th century photographer, the man who first proved through time lapse photography that when a horse gallops, all four hooves are off the ground at the same time. Okay, but 300 pages about his life?

What Solnit does is to simultaneously place him within the context of his time, the geographical west of 19th century California, opened up by the transcontinental railroads, and at the same time, a culture of onrushi If you think of Eadweard Muybridge at all, you probably remember him as an obscure l9th century photographer, the man who first proved through time lapse photography that when a horse gallops, all four hooves are off the ground at the same time. Okay, but 300 pages about his life?

What Solnit does is to simultaneously place him within the context of his time, the geographical west of 19th century California, opened up by the transcontinental railroads, and at the same time, a culture of onrushing technological changes, reflected in his work. She finds in him an individual whose efforts foreshadowed both the growth of the film industry in Hollywood and the technological innovations of Silicon Valley.

Muybridge was an early photographer who captured the grandeur and ruggedness of the western wilderness (sites such as Yosemite Valley) . In doing this, he was creating a myth of the west, photographs of a reality that was out of most peoples’ reach – beautiful landscapes, exotic Indian cultures, (ignoring many realities), and preparing the way for the escapism of what would become known as the movies.

Later, he did extensive work in photographically recording cityscapes and experimenting with the use of time in photography. His photography of galloping horses meant the development of a photographic process fast enough to capture bodies in motion. He invented a machine he called a zoogyroscope which enabled viewers to see figures in apparent motion. He perfected this process in the late l870’s and it was a clear forerunner of the motion picture projector with its 24 frames a second tricking the human eye into the sensation of seeing steady motion, not the actual fact of 24 still images.

What makes this historical study interesting are the connections that Solnit makes with what else was happening during the period. For example, she asks the question of what movies do, if they do not preserve a vision of the past? Wasn’t this the same impulse that moved the westen Indians to perform their “ghost dances”, an attempt to bring back the past, vanished days of prosperity before being overrun by white expansion? Similarly, during the period, the same impulse is found in the popularity of spiritualism, the attempt to communicate with the dead, those beings who have succumbed to time an the past. It’s as if there are currents in the psychic air of the time, ones that were technologically harnessed by individuals such as Muybridge.

She makes a further case that in an individual such as Muybridge many of the forces of what could be called modernism can be found. One way of looking at modernism is that it’s a process in which capitalistic processes, using new inventions, have broken up traditional forms of life. Looked at in this way, Muybridge is at the center of the process. His photography erased established ways of looking at the world, and it would later influence abstract art which questioned the reality of our senses. On a practical level, Muybridge’s time-motion studies were used by industrialists to streamline the factory mass production system. Muybridge did not work in an ivory tower, though; he was employed by Leland Stanford, the railway magnate, who did so much to build the railroads that would transport emigrants to California and radically change its culture which to this day remains a center of technological and cultural innovation.

Solnit’s type of history is one that begins with an individual and examines him to see how his influence spreads in surprising ways. Motion pictures, modern art, tourism, much of the content of modern American life, she contends, was anticipated by Muybridge. Muybridge, she writes, “was at the zero point of the dawn of moving pictures, and he is everywhere as the ghost of those trails of images rushing by” – movies, television, smart phones, changing all the time. Is this making too much of one person? Possibly, but it’s a pleasure to see a historian’s creative mind at work.
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May 06, 2014 Bryan Alexander rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: technology, history

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 balance ...more

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Jan 17, 2013 Fil Krynicki rated it it was ok · review of another edition

I didn't really like this book. I didn't even quite finish it. I believe I am on page 220 or so (of 250). When I couldn't even motivate myself to pick it up on a plane ride home, I knew it was done.

Something about this part-history, part-biography, part-metaphor just doesn't do it for me. All of its subjects are touched on only in moments, and the use of a metaphor of condensing time to connect the disparate pieces always struck me as forced. I learned a little bit, but not a lot, and I was unin ...more

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Oct 13, 2014 Myles rated it it was amazing

Shelves: biography-channel, favorites

(4.7/5.0) Solnit is so obviously influenced by her subject, this pretentious, determined photographer who climbed to the tops of mountain peaks and robber barons' mansions just to find a new perspective. Her take on history is so out there, so committed to linking unexpected events and actors, so refreshing.

She was my professor my last semester at Cal, and she speaks just as she writes, is spider-like in her ability to weave in circles, rapidly and with serious elegance. ...more

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Oct 25, 2014 Jeff Friederichsen rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Solnit's diligent reportage ties a multitude of social movements and technologies into a tight web, revealing the less obvious forces of history. Sometimes the rubber bands of connection come pretty close to snapping, but the result of so much scholarship is impressive. Eadweard Muybridge seems to have been at the very nexus of our modern age—the author leaves no stone unturned in her analysis of his place and time, and the import of his famous motion studies. We know what he did, and when—less ...more

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Mar 03, 2012 Greg Brown rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

Basically amazing. Rebecca Solnit surveys Eadweard Muybridge's life and career, tracing the changing effects of space and time throughout his photographic work. At the same time, Muybridge is but a tiny corner in the story, simply the distillation of the larger cultural currents at play—the annihilation of space and time by railroads, telegraphs, and photography that radically changed our sense of what distance meant and made the world accessible (in a certain sense) to all.

Solnit also pulls off ...more

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Jan 18, 2008 Cheryl Jacobs rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: recommended

Lots of fun California and San Francisco history in this one, all wrapped up in a novel-esque package. Muybridge (known for his motion studies) was an amazing photographer in history, and if you are curious about him, early photography, early western frontier and the railroad, go for it.

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Jul 21, 2010 Whitney rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This book has officially hooked me on Solnit. She's my new Joan Didion. ...more

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Mar 15, 2011 Mir marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: victorian, non-fiction

Not actually about this book (although the book is mentioned), but a good article by the author about "mansplaining."
...more

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Jul 31, 2013 Sara Watson rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: personal-syllabus

Annihilating Time and Space: Reading River of Shadows

It has been a crazy couple of weeks. I was running on full steam wrapping up my thesis through July 22, and then went straight into cleaning-packing-moving mode moments after my return from the Exam Schools. And even after we got nearly all the unpacking done at the end of last weekend (save for the boxes of artwork), I still felt a little brain dead this past week. It was starting to get frustrating, because I wanted desperately to get into t Annihilating Time and Space: Reading River of Shadows

It has been a crazy couple of weeks. I was running on full steam wrapping up my thesis through July 22, and then went straight into cleaning-packing-moving mode moments after my return from the Exam Schools. And even after we got nearly all the unpacking done at the end of last weekend (save for the boxes of artwork), I still felt a little brain dead this past week. It was starting to get frustrating, because I wanted desperately to get into the swing of things, to get caught up on thesis follow-ups and the news I had missed. And more than anything, I was eager to get started in earnest on the book. But I just couldn't get my head back in the game. I found myself wandering from coffeeshop to public library trying to find a comfortable place to reengage my brain. My sense of space and time was all out of whack.

On Wednesday night I picked up Rebecca Solnit’s River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, and it was just the cure for this transition/adjustment malaise. There were so many things about this book that made it just the right thing for me to read at this very moment, and for that I’m thankful. I had come across it when I saw that Tech Book Club read it, and when I bought my mom a copy of Wanderlust: A History of Walking, but I was most recently reminded of it in an essay of Solnit’s I’d saved to Instapaper from a tweet.

In the most basic sense, I had been interested in the book because it covers the life and historical context of Eadweard Muybridge, who essentially developed the means to take rapid shutter speed photographs and thus paved the way for modern cinema to capture moving images. His motion studies of horses and human bodies revealed novel detail that had been previously inaccessible to the naked eye; in gallop, all four of a horses’ hooves do, in fact, leave the ground. I enjoyed reading into the founding story of this period of photography and early cinema, given my background in film studies. We have a lovely print of Muybridge’s dancing couple that we displayed at our wedding (vintage hipster gag, I know) that we had picked up from 20x200. I had a soft spot for the man and his work already, and was eager to learn more.

What I wasn't expecting to find in this book were all the connections to my recent work on the Quantified Self. In many ways, Muybridge was dissecting motion of human bodies, revealing objective, abstracted detail about the body’s movement in much the same way that sensors now enable us measure activity and movement in even greater detail. Muybridge froze time to show the patterns in a walker’s gate. Now instead of freezing time, we’re collecting data all the time, with sensors that track our gate throughout the day and monitor our movement while we sleep. Data now does what celluloid did then, parsing information into smaller and smaller knowable units. But it’s also sometimes uncanny: “Those gestures—a gymnast turning a somersault in mid air, a nude pouring water—were unfamiliar and eerie stopped because they showed what had always been present but never seen." As Solnit puts it: “With the motion studies that resulted it was as though he were returning bodies themselves to those who craved them—not bodies as they might daily be experienced, bodies as sensations of gravity, fatigue, strength, pleasure, but bodies become weightless images, bodies dissected and reconstructed by light and machine and fantasy." I relished the opportunity to connect those dots in my own intellectual history, from film history to internet studies, in a new way in reading this book.

Solnit’s book is about a man, an innovator, but it is also about a place in time. Solnit writes a lot about landscape, the west, San Francisco, etc. I’ve been thinking a lot about the impact that the ideology and the lifestyle of the makers of technology have on its design and adoption in broader contexts, especially now as it enters the intimate realm of our bodies and our minds. I loved the rich descriptions and sweeping connections Solnit makes from the early mining days of San Francisco directly to the emergence of Silicon industries, all happening on the same soil. It made more acute a hankering I’ve been having to spend more time in the Valley, if only to get something of an ethnographic understanding of the contexts and circumstances in which our technologies are built. She described that period in which Muybridge was working with such energy and drama; it made me want to be that much closer to the history that’s happening now.

Solnit has a knack for drawing out these sweeping connections. She does it with such finesse that you don’t want to try to poke holes. She’s connecting a lot of dots, and doing a fine job of telling you precisely why a technological innovation has turned out to be really important. I like the way her mind works, pulling threads together across time and space. I try to do that in my own work. It’s the work of an interdisciplinarian: the railroad and the cinema and silicon valley all begin to make sense together if you are looking at the right pieces.

Reading this got me thinking about what we’re trying to do in if/then. Solnit weaves a story about the rippling effects of converging technologies on the way we see and experience the world. Our book will weave a story about the rippling effects of current technologies, drawing out these connections and pointing to where these moments of change are happening around us right now. The only difference is the clarity and confidence that hindsight affords. I want to write about the near future in the way that Solnit writes about the past.

Solnit writes about how the Victorians worried about losing a sense of place and time, of embodiment: “It is as though the Victorians were striving to recover the sense of place they had lost when their lives accelerated, when they became disembodied. They craved landscape and nature with an anxious intensity no one has had before or since." We’re still worried about technology’s effects on what is lost and what is gained when we change our perceptive abilities. The Victorians grappled with the dichotomy between the natural and the technologically-mediated worlds. Seeing that dichotomy spelled out so clearly through this book, it made all the more clear to me that I think that we’re getting closer and closer to the collapse of these binaries. ...more

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Apr 09, 2015 Joshua Buhs rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, history, history-of-science, biography, reference

Rebecca Solnit explains things to me. Brilliantly.

This book, of course, is the one that inspired her essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” and launched mansplaining. (Which word is recognized by spell check!) Famously, she was at a party and told a man she had just written a book on Eadweard Muyrbidge; the man went on to declaim about a Muybridge based on a book review he had read in the Times. It took Solnit’s companion three times to get the man to understand that that was the book she had written Rebecca Solnit explains things to me. Brilliantly.

This book, of course, is the one that inspired her essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” and launched mansplaining. (Which word is recognized by spell check!) Famously, she was at a party and told a man she had just written a book on Eadweard Muyrbidge; the man went on to declaim about a Muybridge based on a book review he had read in the Times. It took Solnit’s companion three times to get the man to understand that that was the book she had written. He looked discomfited, but continued to lecture her anyway.

The Times was right, though—and the man, too, in his blowhard way—that this is a very important book. It’s instructive to have read it just before I read Conniff’s Species Seekers, since both cover ground that is well known in the history of science—Muybridge is a constant reference in books on modernism and modernity and its connection to science and technology—but while Conniff remains superficial and blithely ignores some of the more interesting historical work on his subject, Conniff probes and pushes and finds new connections.

She is also an excellent writer, and the book is at times almost poetic, but nonetheless with a driving narrative force that is motivated by the circle of connections she finds, and her foreshadowing: the book starts in 1872, with Muybridge taking what amount to stop-motion photos of a horse owned by Leland Stanford, but we don’t get there till late in the book. In the meantime, we get to consider Muybridge’s biography, which is put together with great difficulty—he left scant traces here and there—except, of course, for his murder trial. Yeah, he was an artist and a murderer. And a prophet of modernity.

The first chapter introduces the swirl of themes that will concern the rest of the book. Muybridge’s photographic technology, which allowed him to capture images faster than the eye could otherwise process, was part of a number of nineteenth-century technologies that ushered in the modern world and created a rupture between current civilization and the rest of human civilization because of the way space and time could be not only annihilated (a favorite phrase of the time), but cur up, measured, rearranged and reordered according to human imperatives rather than natural cycles. The steam train was the sine qua non of this technological shift, making it possible to cross the United States in days rather than months (and forcing the US to adopt time zones and get rid of local time). Telegraphy did something similar. At the same time photography was able to completely freeze time.

These changes in the lived world help explain the Victorian fascination with landscapes—it was a way of seeing time played out over the centuries, as well as a distant looking back on natural cycles that were becoming less important—and probably explain why today, the so-called fast world, we look back to Victorian’s for advice, since they were the first to really have to deal with these issues.

Solnit also connects Muybridge to other time and space-destroying technologies. Muybridge was a link between photography and cinema—which of course would become central to creating fictional places and allow experiments in the experience of time—and also connected to the birth of Silicon Valley, through the personage of Leland Stanford, railroad barron, governor of California, corruptor of democracy, and founder of Stanford University. It is an open question how much Muybridge and Stanford influenced each other int he technological innovations that Muybridge created to make nearly instantaneous photographs of horses in motion, and that he would spend the rest of his life perfecting and playing with, studying bodies of all kinds, including naked humans and dancers and gymnasts and birds in flight.

These themes recur throughout the book in chapters that are roughly chronological—although always built with the knowledge of what will come later—trains and horses, photographs and the changing nature of time: the modern world created on the wild frontier, in the San Francisco Ba Area just after the Gold Rush, when social roles were in flux generally. Tied in with this is a biography of Muybridge, who used the fluidity of the West to create and recreate himself again after migrating from England. Soling tracks Muybridge through the scanty traces he left, in censuses and newspaper advertisements and the recollections of others.

Muybrdige, she notes, was an artistically gifted photographer. He was busy taking pictures of the West at a time when Yosemite and similar places were becoming the very Victorian monuments and tourist traps that memorialized different views of time. His vision, Solnit argues, though, was different than others—and here interpretation of his photographs is one of the things that makes the book so great. She is not just oriented around sociological or psychological concerns, but is also attentive to the aesthetic dimension. (I couldn’t help thinking of Susan Sontag, another great writer on photography.) Muybridge won plaudits of the time, too, and had gallery showings.

Eventually, though, Muyrbidge gave up the artistic approach to photography, promising though it was, to concentrate on the technological applications, which lead to his breakthrough in increasing shutter speed and decreasing the time needed for exposure. Solnit argues that the link between the landscape photography and stop-motion photography was a panoramic style of photography that Muybridge practiced on the City of San Francisco itself, figuring out a way to “skin” the city, or compile various photographs into a giant panorama of the city that allowed the viewer to see all of San Francisco in a single photograph.

Solnit herself makes good use of cutting and splicing time and focusing on her theme. There are bits of Muybridge’s life that do not get a long treatment, such as his travels through Central America. Maybe that’s because the sources for it aren’t great, but it’s also a nice narrative strategy, as that would simp;y distract from the themes she is developing, working over and worrying again and again. The book is relatively short, but it feels dense with thought, while never feeling sluggish or hard. It’s an amazing balancing act, a brilliant bit of chronological reconstruction. ...more

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Mar 11, 2018 Lindsay rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I loved this book. Having a newborn meant it took me way too long to read it. Solnit's first chapter alone on the theme of the annihilation of time and space in the 1800s (through trains, telegraphs, and photographs) is really beautiful. I've been interested in Muybridge since an exhibit about him at my college (I was working in the gallery on k-12 outreach programs, so I brought in my old plastic zoetrope for the kids). This is not only a really interesting biography of Muybridge, but also of h ...more

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Feb 07, 2019 Sierra Hansen rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Rebecca Solnit has a gift. In her writing, she traps time as if in a sieve, bringing to mind the tools used to harvest the promised wealth of the gold rush. She locates a subject, and bends it all the way back to the muscle so you can see the fibers, much like the chronological nature of trees when they're cored.
In so many words, that process is what she details in River of Shadows, except in this case, she hearkens back to a time which to those alive today may as well be part of prehistory: T Rebecca Solnit has a gift. In her writing, she traps time as if in a sieve, bringing to mind the tools used to harvest the promised wealth of the gold rush. She locates a subject, and bends it all the way back to the muscle so you can see the fibers, much like the chronological nature of trees when they're cored.
In so many words, that process is what she details in River of Shadows, except in this case, she hearkens back to a time which to those alive today may as well be part of prehistory: Time before motion picture, when photography was a long afternoon of sitting still. Solnit manages to capture the expansion of nationalism and cultural norms so fluently, that you can almost see the edges of the American colonial empire roaring onward in a time lapse, and along with it, the scofflaws and greedy settlers crowding the Natives out of their homelands. She outlines the signing of treaties, documented promises never kept, and the killing of bison for sport which effectively erased the outline of a way of life, one that had been in existence for thousands of years previously but was swept off the plains by rifles, all but eradicating the Native tribes' food supply.
Above all, a book which professes to be about technological enterprises in the West, from railroads to the first motion picture, is actually about increased regulation of time and a greater focus on simultaneity, which gave rise to two giants of contemporary life: Hollywood and Silicon Valley. In the book, we learn that the ball drop on New Years Eve is a vestige of a ceremony in which a golden spike was driven into the transcontinental railroad upon its completion. The moment, and the falling dominoes that lead up to it, are chronicled alongside the life of Eadweard Muybridge, but as is the case with her other non-fiction, there are larger ideological ramifications to focus on. In a choice moment, Solnit invokes Henry David Thoreau in the middle of his Walden experiment:
"What factories had done for work time--impose a standardized, inflexible schedule on workers--the railroads did to the world at large. Midway through that century, Henry David Thoreau was living at Walden Pond, outside the community but near the railroad line. Standard time had not yet regulated America, but the railroad already dominated the experience of time. Thoreau commented, 'I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that I do the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular. Their train of clouds stretching far behind and rising higher and higher, going to heaven while the cars are going to Boston, conceals the sun for a minute and casts my distant field into the shade, a celestial train beside which the petty train of cars which hugs the earth is but the barb of the spear. ... They go and come with such regularity and precision, that the farmers set their clocks by them, and thus one well-conducted institution regulates the whole country.' The railroad had eclipsed the sun." ...more

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Apr 05, 2018 Woodindian rated it really liked it · review of another edition

It’s an interesting read that uses the life of Muybridge, and to some extent Stanford, to describe the the beginnings of modernity. It took me a moment to figure out where I was being lead. I would be following a narrative and find I’d walked into amazing ideas about the loss of place and the shortening of time.

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Oct 12, 2017 Aniruddh Nerlekar rated it liked it · review of another edition

This book was a decent read; could have been a shorter. Living in The Bay Area, it was interesting to see pictures of the city in the old days.

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Jan 28, 2011 Anna rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction

(See my full review here: http://tinyurl.com/5rqxh5k)

I would be interested in this book if it focused solely on the “annihilation of time and space” that hooked so much public and professional attention in the late-nineteenth century, but certainly Muybridge’s life and work is a compelling way to orient this story. And Solnit, as a thinker with broad interests and unabashed fascination in her subject, seems primed to be the perfect guide.

But the wealth of intriguing material here is, unfortunat (See my full review here: http://tinyurl.com/5rqxh5k)

I would be interested in this book if it focused solely on the “annihilation of time and space” that hooked so much public and professional attention in the late-nineteenth century, but certainly Muybridge’s life and work is a compelling way to orient this story. And Solnit, as a thinker with broad interests and unabashed fascination in her subject, seems primed to be the perfect guide.

But the wealth of intriguing material here is, unfortunately, diluted into a pile of anecdotes linked more by association than anything else. Despite the subtitle of my edition of the book, neither time, space, nor Eadweard Muybridge are the consistent threads that serve as a through-line for this book. And for a book wrestling with such big topics as ‘time’ and ‘space’ in 250 pages, that through-line was desperately needed. Solnit indulges tangents that are totally off-scale for this particularly project. There is, for example, an extensive section on the Modoc wars and the tribe’s last stand against the U.S. government. It is a fascinating story, and I credit Solnit for not following a pattern of segregating history relating to Native Americans to only the ‘Native American history’ genre. Rather, she is eager to integrate histories in this book, to point to and sit with intersections of narratives that don’t fit easy genre distinctions.

But. As another reviewer noted, the Modoc war section takes up fully ten percent of this short book. And despite the lyrical musing that Solnit tries to use to hook it all together, really the only connection here is that Muybridge did a big photographic series of the Modoc war for the U.S. government. He spent only about a year of his life with this project. Solnit clearly was just plain interested in the Modoc wars and how it shaped, informed, and revealed the Western landscape and ‘the West.’ Who can fault her? That’s interesting stuff. But it belongs, at least at this level of depth, in a different book.

[...]

Weirdly for a book about the changing experiences of time and pace, Solnit’s digressions serve to make the movement of this book uneasy, and at times illogical. While she uses narrative control on the pace of the book by dividing it into multiple short sections—titled mini-chapters within the chapters—this often created more confusion. In a mini-chapter titled ‘Chicago,’ and dated with the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition spends a third of its five pages discussing how and why Leland Stanford founded a university near San Francisco, and concludes with a paragraph that finds Stanford and the college’s first president effusively reveling in how great California is. How did we get here from the Columbian Exposition way back in the Midwest? I have no idea. ...more

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Mar 25, 2016 Suzi rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

Checked this book out from the library, but ended up buying it halfway through so I could take my time reading it and keep it as a reference. This book is interesting to history, movie, and photo buffs alike, as well as people who just like a good Western story. I came into the book with a BFA in photography and a love a multi-paneled images, so I already had a fair amount of knowledge about Muybridge's photography, but I still learned a ton. History is so much more interesting when art is invol ...more

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Nov 13, 2017 Terry rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: history, science-history, art

notes
story of the photographer Muybridge whose life is interlaced w/ the RR expansion, conquest of the west, and 19th cent technology that 'annihilated time and space' as it was known until then
p.
5 6-7 weeks to cros us; w/ RR, 6-7 days
10 RR, telegraph, steamship annihilate time and space
12 Einstein uses trains in his metaphors
13 Lyell, geologist, believed earth millions yrs old, not thousands believed by biblical scholars
14 Darwin had Lyell's book on Beagle sail, 1831-6
photog in UK, US, France ...more

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Apr 19, 2009 blue-collared mind rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: grassroots-stuff

"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 phenomenon and one that I cannot adequately imagine was like in a time that brought stop action photography, the telegraph, the train (among other innovations), 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 perspective that is necessary, especi ...more

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Jan 17, 2016 John rated it liked it · review of another edition

This was a fairly fascinating subject, and the author did a decent job explaining the impact of Muybridge's work on the culture of California, America and the world.
The first third of the book was very labored though, I thought for a while that the author had never heard of any literary device apart from the simile. She was going at a dozen a page or more. It was almost comical if it weren't so bad.
After a few chapters though the style settled down, though there were still occasional forays back ...more

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Feb 05, 2013 Brinley rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Only complaint really is that I wish there were more images in the book. It felt frustrating for the author to describe a specific photograph in detail only to have no visual accompaniment or to see a completely different picture from that discussed, but from the same series. Otherwise this was a fascinating historical read of a deconstructed Western narrative, and I appreciated the different angles she shed light on in the Anglo development of Northern California, and how the motion studies add ...more

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Jul 14, 2007 David rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: mind-numbingly-boring

Friends raved about this book, and - indeed - it did seem like the kind of subject that I would find interesting. But. I. just. could. not. finish. it. The prose was like molasses, infused with lead. Plodding. Pedestrian. Unreadable. Godawful.

A shame. Because there was probably an interesting story in there somewhere, trying to get out.

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Jan 30, 2008 Matt rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Pardon my French, but this book was f-cking amazing. I haven't been this excited by a book in a long time. ...more

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Nov 08, 2018 Jeremy Cherfas rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I read this as a Real Book, on paper, and not always with pencil in hand, which has good consequences and bad. The good; I do still love real books, for all the room they take up. Being able to look at the many photographs included without any technological nonsense is a treat. The bad; far fewer passages highlighted and noted. Or maybe that is a good?

The story is a complex braid, beautifully wrought. One strand is the railroads that united America, and the rapacious corruption of the railroad o

The story is a complex braid, beautifully wrought. One strand is the railroads that united America, and the rapacious corruption of the railroad owners. The other is Muybridge the man, with all his idiosyncracies and, above all, his obsession with ever faster photographic exposures. Together, as Solnit explains so well, Stanford the railroad baron and Muybridge the image maker, annihiliated space and time. But there are many other strands; to call them minor would be to do them a disservice.

There is Muybridge’s efforts to photograph the wilderness of California, creating the demand for wilderness that still threatens to destroy it. There is the awful saga of his married life and the murder it provoked. There is the Modoc War, which Muybridge photographed, and the strange inversion of time and space that drove Captain Jack and his band to hold out for as long as they did. There is Stanford cruelly airbrushing Muybridge out of the motion studies and how, possibly as a result, Muybridge came to inspire artists in Europe. There is the birth of the movies and the growth of Hollywood, “the whole world and no place at all”. And behind it all, San Francisco, the city that made Muybridge possible and that he recorded in his virtuoso panoramas.

Throughout, Solnit flies from one idea to the other like one of Muybridge’s athletes in motion.

Speed is a basic survival skill for both predator and prey. But races have neither predator nor prey, only competitors. The race simulates the conditions of survival and awards those found most fit not with survival itself but with glory and money. In the nineteenth century a confusion of language arose between the activity and the category of the race, for Europeans and European Americans perceived progress as a race that they, the white race, were winning.

And of course, industrialisation measured efficiency by speed. “Time is money, and the less time used in manufacturing or shipping, the more money amassed”.

At times, Solnit’s uncanny ability to tie together history and make it relevant is undone by an inability to look to the future, by no means unique to her. In an elaborate discussion of the outpourings of entertainment created “for watchers in the cave of representation,” she talks about “the thousands of video-rental stores around the country”. Fifteen years on, or more, all one can do is chuckle. By contrast, some sentences written, obviously, at the same time, are prescient.

Silicon Valley makes entertainment and war seem like one enterprise designed to control populations via the channeling of electrons through circuits, however divergent the details of their deployment.

It is in these final pages that she ties a final ribbon on the braid, noting that the house in Kingston upon Thames where Muybridge was born is now a computer store, “an outpost of Silicon Valley.”

The world seems run from Silicon Valley now, run by engineers whose decisions affect us all, those engineers whose constant question is never why, but only how.

...more

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Jun 11, 2020 Bruce rated it really liked it · review of another edition

There it is , laying on the floor. My first review. I wrote it about 3 months ago. I’m not sure why I didn’t release it; I think it was just too much. So it just languished, now, into oblivion.
This book, “ River of Shadows” , by Rebecca Solnit, is a good book. I felt it was complicated, maybe unnecessarily so, but then again, it is about Edward Muybridge’s life , so that seems appropriate.
Who? Eadward Muybridge, the man of three names, ultimately settling upon the alluded to appellation.
Wh There it is , laying on the floor. My first review. I wrote it about 3 months ago. I’m not sure why I didn’t release it; I think it was just too much. So it just languished, now, into oblivion.
This book, “ River of Shadows” , by Rebecca Solnit, is a good book. I felt it was complicated, maybe unnecessarily so, but then again, it is about Edward Muybridge’s life , so that seems appropriate.
Who? Eadward Muybridge, the man of three names, ultimately settling upon the alluded to appellation.
What? Eadward Muybridge, the photographer, whose inquisitiveness and curiosity had a large and direct impact on the world of photography, and if you have interest in its nascency, you will find it here. Zoetropes, zoopraxiscopes,cinematography, ribbon panoramas, red lanterns. Feel free to dive in.
Where? It’s California, with its lore, majestic mountains, and that long , beautiful coastline with its waves, letting you dream. It’s Nob Hill, where Muybridge’s greatest achievement, his “ mammoth plates” of San Francisco, taken in 1878, is taken ( Nob Hill, changed from California Hill, because that’s where the “ Nobs” lived, Hopkins, Crocker, Huntington, Leland Stanford, of railroad tycoon fame, and Muybridge’s mammoth plates, including all the mansions, the clock of St. Mary’s, and Alcatraz, all readily visible.
When? Eadward Muybridge was born in England in 1824. By 1855, at the age of 31, Muybridge the entrepreneur is living in San Francisco as a bookseller, and is noted 2 years later as selling “ a large case of splendid books” at the Mechanics Fair. Within the timeframe of his life, Muybridge engaged with a multitude of people, many of them now of historical interest in the world of photography and the cinema. It is through his friendship with Leland Stanford, and Stanford’s desire to establish whether or not his horse Occident’s hooves are all off the ground simultaneously, that Muybridge develops his technique of demonstrating motion.

...more

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About Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit

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Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including Call Them By Their True Names (Winner of the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction), Cinderella Liberator, Men Explain Things to Me, The Mother of All Questions, and Hope in ...more

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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.” — 6 likes

“The whites who administered Native American subjugation claimed to be recruiting the Indians to join them in a truer, more coherent worldview—but whether it was about spirituality and the afterlife, the role of women, the nature of glaciers, the age of the world, or the theory of evolution, these white Victorians were in a world topsy-turvy with change, uncertainty and controversy. Deference was paid to Christianity and honest agricultural toil, but more than few questioned the former, and most, as the gold rushes, confidence men, and lionized millionaires proved, would gladly escape the latter. So the attempt to make Indians into Christian agriculturists was akin to those contemporary efforts whereby charities send cast-off clothing to impoverished regions: the Indians were being handed a system that was worn out...” — 3 likes

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