River of Shadows:
Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West
By Rebecca Solnit
Viking, 305 pages, $25.95
Some people will see a brilliant paradox at the center of Rebecca Solnit’s new book, others will just find a shaggy dog story without a solution. It all depends on what you think about the relationship between photography and truth.
Do you believe that photographs are objective by nature? That a photograph is like a footprint in the sand? That it shows you just what was there when the picture was made?
Or do you believe that photographs are more like sand castles, subjective records whose meaning is determined by many competing forces, including the power of the camera, the skill of the photographer and the reason the picture was made in the first place? Was it made to be a work of art? A piece of propaganda? A family snapshot?
Most people would agree that a photograph is a document. The first group will see an image that records the world as it appeared before the camera’s lens. The second group believes it documents what the photographer, and his audience, wanted to see at a particular time and place.
Solnit falls into the second group, and her new book, “River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West,” is one long argument for understanding the information that lies below the surface of a photographic document. In this book, Muybridge’s famous panoramic photo of San Francisco made from Nob Hill in 1877 becomes more than a document of a Victorian city that has vanished. It can also, in Solnit’s view, become the record of the prosperous, serene and nearly empty city that the photographer and his patrons wished to see, and a record that manages to avoid, or conceal, all evidence of poverty, slums and social unrest that would have overwhelmed many citizens when the photo was made. Does that make Muybridge a creative artist–or a liar?
In the 1870s, when Muybridge photographed the spectacular landscape of the Yosemite Valley and the Grand Canyon, he was not content with the information that his camera could record on a single negative. To record the dark, rocky landscape, he had to keep his camera open for a long interval, but to capture large clouds in a bright sky he had to work fast. His solution was to make two negatives–one of rocks, the other of clouds–and combine them in a single print. The final photograph created an impression that was true to his vision, though he altered the photographic record. Today, computers make such work easy. As Solnit shows, photographers have altered their pictures since the medium began in 1839, and Muybridge was among the earliest and most successful manipulators of the medium.
Muybridge is best known for another act of photographic innovation, made in 1872 at the request of railroad czar Leland Stanford. Stanford asked Muybridge to help settle a question about the gait of his champion trotter: Did all four hooves ever leave the ground at once? Muybridge again found a way to use photography to represent something that the human eye could not see. He placed a series of cameras along a track and set them off as the horse ran by. This produced a sequence of images that captured tiny fragments of time and showed phases of the horse in motion, including the moment when all four hooves floated in the air.
The scientific world was pleased, the art world astonished, and the public generally welcomed this as another case of modern technology’s ability to improve and extend human knowledge. Muybridge recognized that this sequence of images offered the chance to accomplish something neither he nor Stanford had imagined when they tried to stop time. In the late 1870s, Muybridge found a way to project the images in a rapid sequence and so create an illusion of a horse in motion. For this discovery he is often called the father of the movies.
Solnit is an environmental activist, art critic and passionate citizen of San Francisco. She is also one of a prominent group of historians and critics that includes Howard Lamar, Patricia Limerick, Richard White and Donald Wooster who study the landscape of the American West the way others study literature, as a continuous, narrative record of the development of our country and our national culture. They are relentless critics of the damage we have done in the name of progress. For them, the railroad’s conquering of North America cannot be considered without remembering the destruction of the Indian tribes. The settlement of the plains and the cultivation of the prairies is also a story of environmental tragedy, bringing an end to species of plants and animals.
For these scholars, photographic images provide a crucial source of information. Images by Muybridge and his contemporaries show us how the landscape appeared in the past. They also view these beautiful photographs as propaganda for the development of the West. These images have also inspired several generations of American photographers, including Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and, more recently, Mark Klett, Marilyn Bridges and Terry Evans, whose work keeps the national myth vigorous and alive. For all the tragedy and destruction that the critics describe, thanks to these photographs–both old and new–we continue to believe in the beauty of our land. For all the motels and billboards that adorn the roads into Yosemite, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon, the power of the myth is so strong that most tourists remember only nature, and none of the tacky culture that goes with it.
For Solnit, this paradoxical capacity is essential to our American culture–and Eadweard Muybridge was among the first to make it work. Fans of Western Americana will know the outlines of his story, but Solnit fills it with fresh research and lively writing. She calls on a dazzling range of information, from detailed accounts of Indian wars to explanations of Leland Stanford’s financing of the Union Pacific Railroad, from clear descriptions of complex, 19th Century photographic technology to primitive techniques of animation. She revels in establishing new connections between old names and faces, including Sitting Bull, William Tecumseh Sherman, the World’s Columbian Exposition, Credit Mobilier and artist Thomas Eakins. Her gift for synthesis, her supple grasp of history and her ability to shift smoothly from fact to metaphor without warning recalls another artful American writer: Henry Adams.
As with Adams, some readers may grow impatient with Solnit’s many learned passages that seem to carry them far from the story. In this book, Muybridge’s photographic panorama of San Francisco is, “[t]o the careful observer, . . . a discontinuity that appears to be a continuity, many hours of the day masquerading as a single supreme moment, like a film in which segments shot at various times are edited into a believable narrative.” Solnit locates Muybridge “at the root, the zero point, the dawn of moving pictures” and sees him “everywhere as the ghost at the end of those trails of photographs rushing by, beamed across the world as television, dreamed across the world as the shared content of contemporary life, present not only as specific images but as several media.”
While some might grow weary of such lyrical passages, others will find this Solnit’s best book so far.
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Mary Panzer writes for American Photo magazine, The New York Sun and the Tribune, and teaches photographic history in the Archives Program at New York University. Her books include “Mathew Brady and the Image of History” and, as co-author, “Separate But Equal: The Mississippi Photographs of H.C. Anderson.” She is working on a history of Look magazine.
