River of Shadows

American author Rebecca Solnit’s biography, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003), chronicles the life and career of Eadweard Muybridge, a nineteenth-century English-American photographer most famous for capturing the gait of a horse using motion capture photography. Doing so settled finally the then-heated debate over whether a horse ever has all four hooves off the ground when running. Through the story of Muybridge's life, Solnit also examines broader technological trends during the second half of the nineteenth century, arguing that these trends are still felt today in the industries of the American West and California, particularly in Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

Born Edward James Muggeridge in England in 1830, Muybridge was the son of grain and coal merchant John Muggeridge. When John died in 1843, Muybridge's mother, Susanna, took over the family business. At the age of twenty, Muybridge relocated to the United States. He lived in New York City until 1855 when he moved to San Francisco. During this time, he worked as a literary agent for the London Printing and Publishing Company. Muybridge also owned and operated a successful bookstore in San Francisco.

In 1860, Muybridge booked passage to England in order to retrieve a number of antiquarian books for his shop. But after missing the boat, Muybridge instead rode a stagecoach headed to St. Louis, where he planned to buy a train ticket to New York City and then sail on to England as planned. However, in Texas, the stagecoach crashed, causing severe head injuries to Muybridge and killing one passenger. For months, he suffered from double vision, impaired sense of taste and smell, and confusion. Many of these symptoms persisted in some form throughout his entire life. Solnit quotes Dr. Arthur P. Shimamura, a modern psychologist who speculates that Muybridge suffered significant damage to his orbitofrontal cortex. Dr. Shimamura attributes some of Muybridge's subsequent creativity to this injury, arguing that it freed him from certain social constraints.



True or not, the injury did lead Muybridge to become a photographer. While convalescing in England after the crash, he took the suggestion of his physician to take up the new and burgeoning field of photography. By the time Muybridge returned to the American West in 1867, he had mastered the wet-plate collodion process of photographic development, a less expensive, less complex, and less time-consuming alternative to the daguerreotype process pioneered in 1839. Muybridge converted a carriage into a portable darkroom, allowing him to take photos of the wilderness. Although he made a living taking studio portraits, Muybridge's most impressive work from this time was a photo series depicting the Yosemite Valley. Muybridge routinely put himself at great physical risk to capture his images, lugging heavy cameras and glass plates up steep ridges. His photos attracted the attention of the U.S. government, which commissioned him to photograph the landscapes and indigenous people of Alaska, which the United States had recently purchased from the Russian Empire.

Muybridge's most famous photographic endeavor commenced in 1872 when racehorse owner and former California governor Leland Stanford commissioned him to use photographic studies to settle the debate over whether a horse ever has all four hooves off the ground when running. Using multiple cameras timed to go off at split-second intervals, Muybridge captured an image confirming that a horse does have all four hooves off the ground at a certain point in its running stride. As Muybridge perfected the process, he eventually captured a horse's entire galloping stride in a series of eleven images. The cameras were triggered to go off by threads that were pulled as the horse passed. Muybridge invented a device called the zoopraxiscope which allowed someone to view the images in quick succession, giving off the impression of watching an animation. In effect, Muybridge had invented the first-ever movie projector. Among those introduced to the zoopraxiscope was Thomas Edison, who four years later invented the Kinetoscope, a similar device that would directly lead to the advent of motion pictures. Solnit captures the importance of Muybridge's zoopraxiscope writing, "He is the man who split the second, as dramatic and far-reaching an action as the splitting of the atom."

The other major event that defined Muybridge's legacy in popular memory occurred in 1874. Two years earlier, the forty-one-year-old Muybridge married twenty-one-year-old Flora Shallcross Stone. Seven months after the birth of a son, Florado, Muybridge discovered that Flora had been carrying on a sexual affair with drama critic Harry Larkyns. Fittingly, Muybridge discovered the betrayal due to an inscription on the back of a photograph. After tracking down Larkyns, Muybridge told him, "Good evening, Major, my name is Muybridge and here's the answer to the letter you sent my wife," before shooting him dead. At his trial, Muybridge pleaded insanity owing to the head injury he suffered in the stagecoach accident. Although the jury rejected this plea, it acquitted Muybridge and termed the homicide "justifiable" because Larkyns had been cheating with Flora.



At the end of the book, Solnit writes not only of Muybridge's influence on the film industry but also on Silicon Valley, arguing that when Bill Hewlett and David Packard first started their company in their garage in Palo Alto, they were driven by the same entrepreneurial spirit of invention that drove Muybridge.

In 1904, Muybridge died of prostate cancer in England.

According to The New York Times, River of Shadows is "a brief summation of a man's life, a meditation on time, image and motion, a history of the American West as a fount of technological innovation and perceptual change, and a beautiful piece of prose."