A study of a horse in motion, by Eadweard Muybridge's.
Did you ever find yourself lying in bed, late at night, thinking about some odd topic and wondering how you got there? Then you count back, trying to find the steps that linked one thought to another, strange leaps that don't seem naturally aligned but have some tie to each other, until you find where you started. Sometimes writing about history isn't so much about telling a linear story as it is about making connections.
In River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Rebecca Solnit tells the story of the life of photographer Eadweard Muybridge (the tortured spelling of his name was his own invention, or re-invention, one might say). For Solnit, though, Muybridge's life and work is really just a jumping off point for meditations on the West and the inventions that propelled America into the age we think of as modern--a time of telephones, phonographs, electric lights, trains, cars, airplanes, and eventually computers and instant worldwide communication through the Internet.
The story of Eadweard Muybridge isn't a bad place to hang all these ideas. Born Edward James Muggeridge in England in 1830, he decided he was meant to seek his fortune in the New World. He made his way to San Francisco and after trying a few different jobs, and a few different spellings of his name, settled on photography and, eventually, Eadweard Muybridge. It took a number of years to get to that name, and in between, he sold his photographs under the name Helios.
One of Muybridge's Yosemite Valley photos.
It was a good time to be in the West and involved in photography. Landscape photography, particularly giant panoramas, were becoming popular, and Muybridge joined the other photographers who tramped out to different locations to try to capture the wild open spaces adored by easterners and Europeans who were already fascinated by the mythology of the West. At that time, photographers used a cumbersome wet plate process to take pictures and developed the photos on the spot, so a veritable entourage of equipment and assistants was required; it wasn't easy by any means. Muybridge achieved some success and showed a flair for the art; he was particularly interested in water, taking photos of rushing falls that came out as solid white on film, and using still pools to reflect and turn upside down lines of trees and rocks.
Moving to America and becoming a photographer was the first major event of Muybridge's life. The next was a stagecoach accident that happened when he was setting out on a trip to photograph Yosemite. Muybridge suffered severe head injuries, and spent the next few years wandering around America and Europe, trying to recover and seeking treatment (he also sued the stagecoach company and won a sum of money from them). The injuries seemed to have affected his personality, causing him to act more moodily, with more extreme moods. But he flourished as a photographer, capturing the attention of ex-California governor and railroad baron Leland Stanford, which led to the next big event of Muybridge's life--a commission from Stanford to photograph one of his prized racehorses in motion, in order to answer a long-argued question about whether while running a horse's four legs were ever all off the ground at once. After some experimentation, Muybridge devised a method of taking photos of the horse, Occident, while running, and found his calling in the field of motion studies (yes, the photos revealed that a horse does, indeed, have all four legs off the ground at once at some points while running).
Muybridge's career was nearly derailed by the next big event in his life--he found out his young wife was having an affair, and came to believe the son she had just borne was fathered by her lover, not Muybridge (this was never actually proven). The photographer immediately went in search of the man in question and shot him point blank. He was put on trial for murder (his legal expenses were footed by Stanford) and was acquitted by reason of justifiable homicide (the lawyers also hedged with an insanity defense, using his head injuries as an excuse for his actions).
Muybridge continued to develop his motion studies. He had a falling out with Stanford over publication of a book about horses in motion, because the author Stanford hired minimized Muybridge's role in the studies, didn't use any of his photographs, and omitted a forward Muybridge wrote. Alienated from his patron, Muybridge took to the lecture circuit, showing his photos on a device he invented, the zoopraxiscope, which rotated the spools of photos rapidly so they appeared to be in motion; it was, in essence, an early motion picture projector. He eventually got a grant to continue his studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he took many photos of nude humans in motion (including himself--for what it's worth, Muybridge never asked his models to do anything he wouldn't do). Eventually Muybridge moved to England, where he died.
This is all you really need to know about Muybridge, perhaps more than you need. Because, as I've said, it's not the man himself that interests Solnit in "River of Shadows," but his work and how it connects to other things. It's been a week since I finished the book and returned it, so it's hard for me to summarize even a few of Solnit's thoughts, ideas, and digressions. The book makes you think, though, and the main things I thought about as I read were about time and vision. With the latter, Solnit talks about the connection between train travel and motion pictures, that is that the sight of the world rapidly passing by through train windows prepared people for watching images rush by on a screen. I'd never thought about that, but it's wonderful to think about how so many things in the world that don't seem connected actually are.
The idea of how time was affected is more complex and far-reaching. Maybe the best way to say it is that up until about the 19th century, man had no control over time. But a number of things changed that--engines led to trains and steamboats and factories, which all altered time. Trains and steamboats not only compressed travel, but made it predictable. You could say "I am sailing on the 16th and arriving on the 24th," or "My train is arriving at 9:46 a.m.," and it would happen. Additionally, the trains and steamboats carried mail, making communication immediate; the telegraph added to this as well. Not only did distance lapse between family, friends, and lovers, but business now could be conducted more quickly. Meanwhile, photographs manipulated time in a different way--they froze it, creating almost a type of time travel in that it let people see others as they were, place as they were, and those that were gone still there in lifelike form; it's no coincidence that the spiritualists seized on photographs to help sell their scams of communicating with the dead. When Muybridge took photos of animals or people in motion, he made time pause so each action could be taken apart and studied; when he spun out the photos in sequence on his zoopraxiscope, he took control of time and motion, making the horse move slower than it really had, or faster. He showed what had happened in the past to an audience in the present. Time was no longer lost, and no longer controlled by nature. People traveled faster, they worked according to the factory clock, not the sun's clock; they stayed up later and had leisure time, aided by elecric light bulbs. They sent messages which arrived instantly, not in weeks or months. Just as dramatically as human lives had changed when people learned how to control fire, now lives were altered by time, captured, controlled, and manipulated. Railroads, photographs, Muybridge's horse photos, all connected.
"River of Shadows" contains many more interesting mini-essays about a variety of topics, ranging from the mystique of the old West to gender roles (why did Muybridge have women go through different actions than men in his photos). Solnit's writing is less that of a historian's style than that of a poet writing in a room lit by a candle on a rainy night; moody and contemplative rather than linear and even-handed. Sometimes the poetry of her prose got on my nerves, making me feel like, "okay, let's get on with it," but that flaw lies more with me than the author, I'm sure. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in photography, but more especially to those who want to look at history in a different way.
And now off I go, and when I am sitting in the train and it emerges from the tunnel to the elevated tracks and the east side skyline rises over the graffiti marked buildings of Queens, I'll think about the view from each window as an individual photograph, as a moment in a day, a month, a year, that may never be quite the same again, because no moment is the same as another, as photos from one fraction of a second to another show. Something can be frozen forever in a photo, but it cannot ever quite be repeated. Even looking at a photograph, when the picture now become officially a memento of the past, changes it because when we look at it now, from the present, we are changing it by what we know of what was once the future. Nothing can be the same.
Am I making any sense? I'm not. And that's fine today.
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