The man who stopped time

Rebecca Solnit’s “River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West” is a perfect example of a subject waiting -- in this case for almost a century and a half -- for the appropriate writer to come along to unlock its concealed meaning and unexpected relevance. The subject is Eadweard Muybridge the photographer and Eadweard Muybridge the phenomenon, and together they have brought out in Solnit a book that is so spirited and free-ranging, so Western in its unfettered questing curiosity, that its genre is not easy to define. This portrait of a man, a place, a time, a technology, an art and various other matters that elude encapsulation shines on nearly every page with rigor and gusto and is consistently a delight to read.

“Delight” is probably a word that was never applied to Muybridge, an obstinate, gloomy, solitary figure who, by photographing a horse in motion in California in 1872, “helped launch,” Solnit contends, “the world we live in.” Instead the delight belongs to the writer and has a good deal to do with her methodology, which might be summarized as a persistent search for the surprise connection or reverberation between past and present, photograph and reality, a man and his time.

Although Solnit considers Muybridge biographically, she has not written a pure biography. She analyzes his photographs but has not delivered only a critical study. There is a good deal of history in “River of Shadows,” but it is built up out of excursions into the past that branch and fork, as needed, into the history of art and photography, landscape and nature, business and industry, cowboys and Indians; there are pieces of the history of the railroad, the telegraph, the Gold Rush, the mid-19th century boom years in San Francisco and what she calls the “headstrong, rootless sense of the heroic possibilities and glamour still summed up by the word California.”

Ah, California: Using Muybridge as her conduit, Solnit builds a case for the state having produced an alternative modernism, a kind of balancing pendant to the artistic and literary modernism that emerged in Paris in the 19th century. California’s modern experience, she argues, is an “amalgamation of technology, entertainment, and what gets called lifestyle.” She even goes so far as to nominate the moment when the railroad baron Leland Stanford engaged the photographer Eadweard Muybridge to see if he could make an image of a horse in motion as a creation story behind California’s two significant transformations of the world, Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

Why these men, why this place, why this particular experiment? The men seem, above all, to be an accident of timing, two figures falling into each other’s lives because of the parallel evolution of two technologies. One of the four masterminds of the transcontinental railroad, Stanford helped transform space, as Muybridge, with his photographs, helped to transform time. Along the way Stanford made an enormous (also illegal, also perhaps immoral) quantity of money, which allowed him to become a patron of ideas. A collector of racehorses -- an all-too-fitting pursuit for a man who sped up transcontinental travel -- Stanford sought to answer a pressing question of his era: whether a trotting horse lifted its four hoofs off the ground at once.

In providing the answer (it was yes), Muybridge was not merely devising an experiment to satisfy a patron; he was conducting his own inquiry into motion -- “the motion of shutters and the speed of film” -- and was thereby furthering an intellectual and creative quest that began the first time he picked up a camera in the mid-1860s. In the kernel of this experiment in applied science, Solnit sees the origins of the university Stanford would eventually found in his son’s memory. Muybridge, for his part, told Charles Knowles, a carpenter who as a young man assisted him with the early motion studies, that he knew they were going to be “successful in everything that moves. It is going to make a thorough revolutionizing in photography.”

Statements like these -- whether of purpose or self-assessment, sometimes even of simple fact -- are rare in the Muybridge record, except when he appeared in court, which he did at three key junctures of his life. Indeed one of the great challenges in approaching Muybridge the man is the scarcity of biographical material. Born in England in 1830, he immigrated to the United States in, perhaps, 1852; by 1855 he was living in San Francisco, where he worked as a seller of art books until 1860. In July of that year he had a stagecoach accident in which he injured his head, possibly in the region of his orbitofrontal cortex which, Solnit speculates, might have made him more creative and altered his personality. (“Among the common effects of these contusions,” she says, “are emotional outbursts, inappropriate social behavior, risk-taking, obsessive-compulsive behavior, and loss of inhibition.”) In 1866 he went into the photography business, and by 1867 he was making pictures in Yosemite, work that helped to establish him as one of photography’s most gifted practitioners in Northern California.

Muybridge’s visits to court involved his stagecoach accident (he brought suit); the criminal case in which he was tried for the murder of his young wife’s lover (he was found innocent by reason of insanity); and, later in life, Stanford, whom he sued regarding the assignment of credit for the motion studies, which were by then famous (suing a man of Stanford’s resources was pure folly).

The murder, which Solnit has called “the most sensational, least significant thing Muybridge did,” came about when Muybridge, doubting the legitimacy of the baby boy Flora Muybridge had borne him, succumbed to a fit of rage, hunted down her lover and shot him to death (the fit, however, lasted for the many hours it took Muybridge to travel from San Francisco to Calistoga, where Flora’s lover, Harry Larkyns, was working on a newspaper). In a conventional biography this crime would be given a prominence of place; while Solnit’s narrative slows around the sad and dishonorable event, it is largely because she is interested in combing through the court records for whatever they can reveal about Muybridge’s work, creative habits and his social and professional milieu.

Muybridge’s biographical vacuum seems to bring out in Solnit’s thinking and writing an ever more balletic curiosity, as she finds and makes shapes, associations and connections among the various themes in his photographs that he may not have seen or maybe even intended. This is a critic’s prerogative, if not her specific mission, of course, and while Solnit often makes ambitious interpretations of the work, she never romanticizes her subject’s gifts at the expense of his flaws. Muybridge, she writes in a representative balanced passage, “worked for the monopolies and robber barons of the day and genuflected before power ....He was boastful .... He was a murderer. But it is impossible to despise and dismiss him. He was a damaged man, an isolated one, and apparently one who suffered deeply. If he had been pure prodigy we could label him such and file him away in one of history’s commodious drawers. If he were nothing but a charlatan or a criminal, the same would be true. That he is all of these things means he is not so easily got rid of.”

Quite understandably it is Muybridge the prodigy who draws the bulk of Solnit’s attention. She celebrates his landscape photography, which she sees as reflecting the Victorians’ love of nature but also expressing a certain anxiety as it strove to “recover the sense of place [the Victorians] lost when their lives accelerated.” As with most pictures Muybridge made, his landscapes had what might be called a certain Muybridgian quality: In Yosemite, for example, on his second photographic tour, he sought the evanescent where his predecessor Carlton Watkins sought the eternal. He photographed water; he added clouds (from his archive of separate negatives) to the sky; he took pictures of the last Indians living in the valley, a people soon to vanish. Often he inserted small, mysterious figures whose purpose seems unclear, though tiny mortal humans set against enormous everlasting rock formations obviously suggest something about different relationships to time.

Time, for Solnit, is Muybridge’s persistent theme. She sees him documenting its passage in his serial photographs of the United States Mint being built and in his photographs of an eclipse of the sun. The panoramas he made of San Francisco were his “most complex investigation of the subject of time before the motion studies”; photographing from Mark Hopkins’ unfinished mansion on Nob Hill, Muybridge captured an impossible sight, a vision of the city in all directions that was “on a scale to be traveled through in time.”

In their way, Muybridge’s panoramas prefigured cinema, as the famous motion studies did more specifically. Conducted first in the early 1870s with Stanford as his patron, afterward in Philadelphia during the late 1870s, the motion studies, Solnit argues, allowed Muybridge to make three great photographic breakthroughs: By developing a fast shutter, he devised a photographic process fast enough to capture not just horses but other animals and also men, women and children in motion. Using multiple cameras he created successive images that, mounted together, “reconstituted a whole cycle of motion rather than isolating a single moment.” And finally, near the end of his career, he reanimated the photographs as a moving picture, using his zoopraxiscope, a sort of advanced cross between a magic lantern and a zootrope (which was a drum, pierced with slots and fitted with images, that, when spun, gave the illusion of movement). All this carried photography closer to motion pictures, “the first new artistic medium in millennia.”

Although Solnit keeps her eye on the larger arc of Muybridge’s accomplishments, she also manages to look down a number of alleys of the past and to find, tucked away in them, some wondrous moments and connections. To show that Muybridge was born into an “almost medievally slow world,” she tells the story of how, when his grandfather did business, he would take a carrier pigeon with him to London. Once he had bought his cargo of wheat or coal, he would affix a note to the pigeon telling an associate how many barges he needed to transport the cargo, and release the bird; the barges would set out before his return and therefore save time. In the photographer’s childhood, then, “nature itself was the limit of speed.”

After the Civil War, she reports in a strange, haunting link, negatives made in the battlefield on glass plates were recycled into greenhouse windows, their “images of the harvest of death gradually fading away to let more and more light in on the orchids or cucumbers beneath.” The indulgence of the Gilded Age comes through in all its vulgarity and excess when she describes a banquet in Sacramento at which Jane Stanford was presented with a huge silver platter: Under its lid, her new baby, the Stanford heir, was lying on a bed of blossoms, waiting to be displayed to guests.

Solnit describes a curious discovery, in a Bay Area junk shop in the 1950s, of a photo album called the Brandenberg album after the man who bought it. Pasted into its 138 pages were photographs of the 1870s divided between portraits of entertainers and views by Muybridge; she supposes that it was assembled by Flora Muybridge, who made her husband’s photographs “scenic background to her urban demimonde.” It seems almost as though this album, which was itself a new way of ordering experience in the period, contained in it the seeds of Flora’s unfortunate fate (her lover came from that demimonde, and presumably she was free to spend time with him because her husband was away making pictures).

Then there are the various reverberations of Muybridge’s motion studies. Degas drew them. Thomas Eakins included them in his classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. The academic painter Louis-Ernest Meissonier, whose fidelity to the way horses ran led him to follow alongside them on his estate while he was pushed on a sofa on wheels, was so thrown by the photographs that he declared, “Never again shall I touch a brush!” Later on, when Meissonier reversed himself and painted a portrait of Leland Stanford, he included a volume of the published motion studies open on a nearby table, lying “like a virus in the body, a virus that would change the nature of the visible.”

“River of Shadows,” which is full of such jewels, closes with two so fitting that Solnit might as well have invented them. They are the location of Flora Murybridge’s grave -- it lies behind a United Artists Multiplex Cinema in Colma, Calif. -- and the business now occupying the house in which Muybridge was born in Kingston-upon-Thames: It is a computer store or, as she puts it, “a shell stuffed with California.” All this, and so much more, emanating from that moment in 1872 when a man photographed a horse and tapped into “one of the great enigmas of modern life: why the representation of a thing can fascinate those who would ignore the original.” While this is the one rare matter Solnit does not, and probably cannot, explain, she does help us to see, perhaps for the first time with such clarity and verve, the direct line between Muybridge’s trotting horse and America’s, if not the world’s, most passionate pastime: watching lives, and stories, unfold through pictures that move.

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From ‘River of Shadows’

Through the new technologies -- the train to the landscape, the camera to the spectacle -- the Victorians were trying to find their way back, but where they had lost the old familiar things they recovered exotic new ones. What they had lost was solid; what they gained was made out of air. That exotic new world of images speeding by would become the true home of those who spent their Saturdays watching images beamed across the darkness of the movie theater, then their evenings watching images beamed through the atmosphere and brought home into a box like a camera obscura or a crystal ball, then their waking hours surfing the Internet wired like the old telegraph system. Muybridge was a doorway, a pivot between that old world and ours, and to follow him is to follow the choices that got us here.