Solnit Takes on the West, Photography and Doesn't Disappoint

books:


	• River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West Rebecca Solnit Viking Adult, 2003 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 12 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Stunning writing

Rebecca Solnit is an amazing writer. She brings to the surface all the hidden currents of the Muybridge story in a narrative that is at once informative and moving. This book constantly surprised and delighted me with its deep insights and fascinating details. Not only is it well researched, but the results of the research are germane to the story and are all neatly brought together. It was a pleasure to discover that fine writing like this still exists. I can't wait to read her other books now that I have found her.

A Work of Art

Solnit's book is not simply a biography of photographer Eadweard Muybridge. It is also a fascinating cultural history of California in the nineteenth century, and the resonance that this lost world has for our own time. Gracefully interweaving the tragic history of Indian extermination with the triumphs of industrial expansion (specifically the railroad), and the rapid progression from "instantaneous photography" to the cinema itself, Solnit makes a compelling case for viewing Muybridge, his patron Leland Stanford, and the epic West as the staging ground for modern ways of seeing and thinking. This is a book that, while describing great art and the conditions that created it, is itself a great work of art, a literary landscape that acknowledges the good that came from Muybridge and his time, as well as what was lost. Essential reading for anyone interested in American history, film studies, or art history.

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Unique story of the pre-modern West

Few authors have tied together the many facets of the post civil war, pre-modern West as well as Rebecca Solnit. Her literary vehicle is a man as strange as his name, Eadweard Muybridge. Of course you can also read this book to learn about the early days of photography and the technology which preceeds motion pictures. For either reason this is an excellent biography and will serve the inteerests of many readers.

This is a marvellous book

This is a splendid book, intelligent,stimulating, the best kind of cultural history. It illuminates the origins of photography, cinema, and the construction of the American west.

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Solnit Takes on the West, Photography and Doesn't Disappoint

Muybridge was an interesting character aside from his pioneering landscape photography and motion studies. Rebecca Solnit is an interesting character aside from her accessibility and easy readable style. She is uncommonly skilled in describing her subject and what he did as well as explaining the historical context and landscape into which Muybridge inserted himself.

Gold rush California was a wild and raw landscape, filled with the last gasps of the American frontier as the Sierra was trampled by the world's riffraff. Muybridge dragged his huge camera into the mountains capturing images of Yosemite from perspectives many of us with much lighter cameras and easier trails wouldn't dream of attempting.

While Solnit makes a reasonable case for Muybridge's pioneering technology work in pre-motion pictures as well as still photography, she misses the continuing photographic California thread down the road from Leland Stanford's Palo Alto ranch, where Silicon Valley turned the telephoto lens around and photographically shrank designs onto silicon wafers. A minor point.

Nevertheless, this book, like her Savage Dreams, is an exquisite bit of California and photographic history. Anyone with an interest in Yosemite, landscape and nature photography should have this on their bookshelf!

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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 the threshold of modernity.

During a period of feverish creativity that commenced in 1872, Eadweard Muybridge succeeded for the first time in capturing and reanimating high-speed motion on film-the crucial breakthrough that made movies possible. He also continued his series of breathtaking photographs of the monumental landscape of the American West, served as official photographer of the grueling war against the Modoc Indians, and, in a blaze of publicity, stood trial for the murder of his wife's lover. In Solnit's taut, compelling narrative, Muybridge's life becomes a lens for a larger story about the transformation of time and space in the nineteenth century. With dazzling erudition and a rare mastery of the interlocking histories of art, technology, politics, and commerce, Solnit shows how the peculiar freedoms and opportunities of post-Civil War California led directly to the two industries-Hollywood and Silicon Valley-that have most powerfully defined the contemporary world.

River of Shadows is Solnit's most captivating book yet-wide- ranging in its allusions, daring in its connections, always surprising in its conclusions.

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