River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West Julie K. Brown (bio) River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. By Rebecca Solnit. New York: Viking, 2003. Pp. 305. $25.95. The figure of Eadweard Muybridge has loomed so large in the writings of historians in visual culture since the 1970s—with the work of Anita Mozley, Robert Hass, Gordon Hendricks, and most recently of Marta Braun—that it is hard to imagine there is much left to say about this enigmatic personality or his work. Well, apparently there is more, and Rebecca Solnit's new book reminds us that the artifacts of history can be used as tools for creating a new kind of narrative rather than just new information. What Solnit has produced is an unusual narrative essay that draws directly on the work and research of previous writers. Her strategy is to reconnect Muybridge's work within a complicated network of "the central stories of his time—the relationship to the natural world and the industrialization of the human world, the Indian wars, the new technologies and their impact on perception and consciousness" (p. 6). These themes on the intersections of the individual with nature, the machine, and native peoples are not new for Solnit, who has explored them in her previous writings, which include meditations on travel (A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland, 1998) and walking (Wanderlust: A History of Walking, 2001). Solnit's fluid narrative interlaces a complex series of events with the critical moments of Muybridge's work, from the period of his self-created western identity, to the conflict of his ambitions as a photographer of landscape and his experimental motion studies, to his failed personal life. This scheme is most effectively carried out in the chapter titled "Lost River," setting out the context for Muybridge's photographs of the 1872-73 Modoc War, so called, in which fifty-two Modocs opposed a thousand U.S. Army troops. "Two different worldviews were in collision" in that uprising, writes Solnit. "The Modoc world had a center," while the soldiers' world was "determined by the clock . . . and abstractions in which one parcel of land was interchangeable with another" (p. 109). Solnit sees this dichotomy as part of the larger experience of "being elsewhere in space and time," a transformation made possible by the railroad, photography, and telegraphy (p. 19). She acknowledges both limitations to [End Page 426] these technologies—things, for example, that were "hard to photograph: guerrilla warfare, the end of an era, the meaning of place" (p. 103)—and the fact that Muybridge complicated "the record as he made it" (p. 123). The void left between the image and these realities is what Solnit attempts to transverse in her extended essay. Her layered narrative sets out to reconnect Muybridge's image making to the history of which it was originally part and thereby make visible what is essentially missing in the photographs. Solnit's facility with language is her greatest strength, though sometimes her extravagances are not sustainable: she writes of Muybridge, for example, "He is the man who split the second, as dramatic and far-reaching as the splitting of the atom" (p. 7). There are, however, real pleasures for the reader in the way she makes insightful connections from previously well-worn material. The number of illustrations is minimal, and the reader is meant to refer to the photographic credits for the more important collections of original Muybridge photographs and websites. A bibliography would also have also been useful in directing readers to Muybridge's published images as well as to the literature acknowledged only briefly in the notes to the text. Solnit believes that the best essay ever written on Muybridge was the late filmmaker Hollis Frampton's "Eadweard Muybridge: Fragments of a Tesseract" in the March 1973 issue of Art Forum. In rereading this essay one is struck by Frampton's clear, tightly focused, and sharp assessment of Muybridge's sensibility and "absorption in problems that have to do with what we call time" (p. 50). While Solnit's book has moments of similar intensity, it is not entirely clear that...