Locomotion
A Review by David Thomson

It is a wonder there are not more books about Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904). He was an astonishing photographer, intrigued by both immense distances and tiny movements of the human body. To scan the superficial facts of this adventurer's life is to realize that Muybridge contributed significantly to a period of convulsive change, and that he might be the subject of a great novel. But we know only enough about him to be intrigued, not enough to furnish that fictional life.

Rebecca Solnit has never published fiction, which is not to say that she lacks a large, ambitious imagination. She has been moved to print by Muybridge, and the result is rich and rewarding, even if much of her material cannot be made to fit together. She has rescued a strange, inexplicable fellow from mere histories of photography. After this book, it will not be possible to think of Muybridge as less than one of the great uneasy Victorians.

Such a book faces the experiments that its subject made with his own name, so that the actual humdrum English Edward Muggeridge took flight in romantic spelling and a mythical mind's eye structure. For illustration, there are the noble but mysterious nudes that march in the silent parade of Muybridge's photographed figures. But still the greatest literary thrill awaits. At some point in such a book, the author is going to be able to say — as Solnit does, on page three — that "in the eight years of his motion-study experiments in California, [Muybridge] also became a father, a murderer, and a widower, invented a clock, patented two photographic innovations, achieved international renown as an artist and a scientist, and completed four other major photographic projects."

I know, I know, you want to hear about that clock. All in good time. In life, everything stops for murder. In 1874, in San Francisco, Muybridge was forty-four. He had been married for three years to Flora Stone, very pretty, half his age, married once but divorced, a photographic re-toucher at one of the city's many galleries. A son was born to the couple in April of that year, called Florado Helios. "Helios," Greek for sun, had been a professional name that Muybridge briefly adopted as he made the career shift from bookseller to photographer.

On October 17, Muybridge found a photograph of Florado, with an inscription on the back — "Little Harry" — and "stamped on the floor and exhibited the wildest excitement. His appearance was that of a madman; he was haggard and pale, his eyes glassy; his lower jaw hung down; showed his teeth; he trembled from head to foot, and gasped for breath. He was terrible to look at." These are the words of Susan Smith, nurse to Mrs. Muybridge, and indiscreet enough to explain that "Harry" referred to Harry Larkyns, a "man-about-town" whom Muybridge had already warned to leave his young wife alone. Yet it is plain that Flora and Harry were often together during Muybridge's extended photographic journeys. That same day, Muybridge caught the four o'clock ferry from San Francisco to Vallejo, and then went by train up the Napa Valley to Calistoga. Arriving there by 10:30 p.m., he found Larkyns in a group playing cribbage and shot him. Struck an inch below the left nipple, Larkyns staggered out of the house and died under an oak tree.

As you might expect, the trial in Napa was far more closely covered than the events of the troubled marriage. The defense was led by William Wirt Pendegast, a noted orator and a friend to Muybridge's patron Leland Stanford, president of the Southern Pacific Railroad and governor of California. The plea was not guilty by reasons of insanity. How could unreason be alleged in this Muybridge who was one of the world's finest photographers, and who had already devised a system of successive, "instantaneous" pictures, enough to prove that Stanford's horse, Occident, sometimes had all four hooves off the ground when running?

In 1860, in Texas, Muybridge had been involved in a stagecoach accident in which he suffered a head injury. The only record of the event is Muybridge's later claim that he had suffered double vision, some loss of smell or taste, and confused ideas. These symptoms are often linked to concussion, but Solnit has enlisted a Berkeley neurologist who "makes a strong case" that Muybridge suffered brain damage in Texas. "Among the common effects of these contusions," she writes, "are emotional outbursts, inappropriate social behavior, risk-taking, obsessive-compulsive behavior, and a loss of inhibition."

The Napa court did not have the benefit of those words. But it listened to stories of the accident and a few anecdotes about Muybridge being absent-minded, careless with money, and "strange." One of these tales involved him posing on a high, rocky outcrop in Yosemite — no matter that the site was famous for daredevil acts and souvenir photographs. (There is one of two ladies dancing on the jutting nose of flat rock). Pendegast was magnificent if corny on behalf of Muybridge:

I cannot ask you to send this man forth to family and home — he has none. Across the arch of his fireplace where once was written the words Home — Wife — Child — Content and Peace, there now appears as a substitute for all, placed there by the destroyer, the single awful word "Desolation." But I do ask you to send him forth free — let him take up the thread of his broken life, and resume that profession upon which his genius has shed so much luster — the profession which is now his only love. Let him go forth into the green fields, by the bright waters, through the beautiful vallies, and up and down the swelling coast, and in the active work of securing shadows of their beauty by the magic of his art, he may gain "surcease of sorrow" and pass on to his allotted end in comparative peace.

The jury — twelve married men from rural California in 1875 — argued into the night. They were split at first, then the persuading began. Next morning they acquitted Muybridge. More than that, they ignored the judge's instructions and said that the killer was not insane either. Frustrated in attempts to get a divorce or alimony, Flora died a few months later. (She alleged in divorce filings that Muybridge watched her as she slept.) A local paper said that she was out of her mind. Muybridge put the surviving son, Florado, in an orphanage and never had anything else to do with him. Florado died in 1944, but Solnit has seen a picture of him as an adult (it is not included in this book) where something like resemblance suggests to her that he may have been Muybridge's son after all. (When it comes to seeing such resemblances, photography sheds its famously factual nature and becomes illustration to a novel.)

I have recounted the circumstances of murder and trial in as matter-of-fact a way as possible to stress how much they belonged to their moment and place. Muybridge behaved like a successful, privileged male in an age when San Francisco was dominated by that kind of club ethos. On the journey from the city to Calistoga, he had time to nurse his revolver and to calculate that a local jury would likely arrive at the conclusion that any wronged husband had something like a right to kill the other man. There was no need to mask premeditation and simple accomplishment (just one shot would do), and no ultimate reason to claim insanity. The thinking was orderly, and, as passing time rid Muybridge of his rival, his wife, and then his son, he passed on to the work that he loved.

The nurse, Susan Smith, saw a man in disarray at the discovery that Florado might not be his own son. But Muybridge delivering one shot hours later is a composed figure, someone in whom the heat of the moment has turned to malice and calculation, who seems even to have concluded that whatever he once thought of Florado, and whatever love he had felt for the infant, there was no need now to persist with it. It is a little easier to believe that Eadweard Muybridge was a local, selfish bastard (a man of his time) than that he was a strange poet of disturbed mind.

Solnit is not comfortable with Muybridge the man, but that difficulty comes in great part from the enormous load that she puts on him as a cultural figure. You can feel some of that in this halting, then leaping, process of admiration, or elevation:

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.... The alienation that is a hallmark of Muybridge's personal life is evident in his photographs; the independence of vision in the photographs also characterized his maverick life. But the masterful clarity of Muybridge's photography is in stark contrast to the emotionally overwrought man on exhibit in the trial. The "great man" version of history has been much attacked in recent years, but Muybridge is worth examination not because without him there would have been no movies but because with him we can start to understand something about their source.

This book is not a biography of Eadweard Muybridge. The known facts about this odd man are gathered, but that only indicates that we know too little to make a whole story of his life. So, somehow, the historian and the onlooker have to reconcile those facts, the profusion of the Muybridge photographs generally known as the Animal Locomotion series, and an 1872 snapshot of him sitting on a packing case beneath a sequoia tree in Yosemite — fierce, impacted, tense, handsome, passionate, angry, intellectual, forbidding. All of those adjectives fit without any sure need for such captions as "disturbed, deranged, mad." Yes, he looks obsessive, but even in 1872, I think, one might have some reason to wonder whether this is the true imprint of obsession, or the picture of a man trying to signal, "Don't disturb me, because I'm obsessed." Or damaged. Or whatever.

Even if River of Shadows is finally as beyond categorization as it is marred by its very large assertions, still it is a book of enormous intelligence and fascination. Solnit's previous books include Wanderlust, a history of walking; As Eve Said to the Serpent, a study of landscape, gender, and art; and Savage Dreams, an account of the landscape wars of the American West. She would seem to be a natural scholar, an intense fabricator of far-reaching ideas, and — most of the time — a careful, elegant writer who can lead willing students up precipices of thought. But the question she never quite addresses is whether, on the brink, it is more proper to jump in the hope of soaring or to find a careful way down.

Consider Solnit's assertion that there would have been no movies without Muybridge. It is certainly true that, after his trial for murder, and with the renewed support of Leland Stanford, Muybridge embarked in the early 1880s on a crucial series of still photographs of horses in motion that employed radically briefer exposure times than had been known before, and devoted several pictures or exposures to as little as one second of real time. Then, with the use of a kind of zoetrope — a spinning apparatus that allowed the eye to fix on these successive images in sequence — the appearance of real motion and passing time was obtained.

This accomplishment attracted enormous attention all over the world, and rightly. A technical breakthrough had been demonstrated; and the results were beautiful and mysterious in ways that still defy verbal description. But that is not the same as saying there would have been no movies without Muybridge. It had been foreseen for years before 1880 that something like the technology of moving film was within reach. Among those encouraged and stimulated by Muybridge's demonstrations were Etienne-Jules Marey, Thomas Alva Edison, the Lumière brothers, and the Eastman Kodak people, all of whom made contributions to the gradual development of moving film. And all of whom depended on us, the audience, to show them how powerful the invention might be.

In fact, Muybridge showed no special enthusiasm for that end. From the studies of horses he moved on to those grave, epic, dreamlike studies of fundamental human movements — a man walking, a woman pouring water, an umbrella being opened — that are the material of Animal Locomotion, and, I think, the great work of his life. Muybridge was self-taught, a bit of an adventurer and an opportunist, and responsive to money, but he did not really join in the chase for moving pictures that culminated in 1895. Indeed, in 1894 he returned to England and to the small town of Kingston, southwest of London, where he had been born. He lived there for a decade more, doing very little as far as research can tell, yet somehow inclined to settle for the mists and the chill and the tame views of Thames life, no matter that he had once surveyed the marvels of Yosemite.

Evidently, something in the adventurer, in the commanding seer of epic views, remained English, provincial, and banal. This is hardly consistent with the life of risktaking, the loss of inhibition, and so on anticipated by that Berkeley neurologist. Solnit says that Kingston was not far from London in Muybridge's day. But recall how in the movie The Hours Virginia Woolf loathes the huge cultural gulf between "town" and Richmond, her resting place, which was closer to London than Muybridge's Kingston.

Had Muybridge never existed, there would still be movies, and probably they would have pierced the darkness of a Paris salon just as they did in 1895. Far too many inventors and businessmen were pursuing the trail. More to the point, there was a pressure in society, a need for some kind of mass medium, not just storytelling or a show for everyone, but a communal focus for that startling new urban phenomenon, the masses. In exploring the history of the movies, in other words, it is beside the point to look for heroic figures who did it and determined it. None of the actual pioneering figures — and this is true of Edison and of the Lumière brothers — had any sure sense of how what we now call "the movies" would turn out.

Solnit's assignment of so much credit to Muybridge is romantic and almost yearning, and it is inspired by her own introduction, sweepingly titled "The Annihilation of Time and Space." That is a ringing title, to be sure, and it is not hard to grasp, or to share some of Solnit's intellectual excitement. But the slogan claims much more than her story supports. It is the self-assigned gospel of River of Shadows that toward the close of the nineteenth century, enormous changes sound together like the different impulses or themes in an Ives symphony. The railroads and telegraphy make the United States smaller; and photography and the movies altered our ordinary relationships with time; and all of this was in the new world's new world, the glorious West, a place where, eventually, through Hollywood and Silicon Valley, new technologies would shape the mind of the world.

Well, wait just a minute. It is certainly true that the railroads changed the potential for travel in the United States — and opened up the touristic and picturesque value of the West, something that may have driven Muybridge into photography as a new career. And it is true that Ulysses S. Grant had said, in 1839, that train travel (at an average of twelve miles an hour) had "seemed like annihilating space." But that is pre-presidential talk, if you like. (Even the ex-president of Princeton, Woodrow Wilson, was one day hustled into promo-speak when he said that Birth of a Nation was like "history written in lightning," as opposed to lies in the limelight.) Space was not annihilated, even if life was enriched and accelerated. Indeed, Muybridge's own landscapes, and his fastidious panoramas of San Francisco, attest to the new glorification of real space, of physical vista and actual distance. While it is true that in Muybridge's pictures people sometimes seem like the tranquil pilgrims of an eternal treadmill, those pictures are nonetheless full of a sense of journey, of space being traversed — by a stride, a glance, a thrown ball, a somersault.

Just as you can argue that the era showed a new awareness of the finite detail of space (as well as its epic splendor), so the new insights of photography did not really collapse or kill time. Rather, they allowed us so many new ways of playing with it. (Allegedly, those first pictures of the horse Occident — whether he ever lost contact with the ground — were made to settle a wager or an argument.) The eye had never seen, or known it was seeing, certain anatomical attitudes before, or not until Muybridge's fractional exposures. And, yes, with the zoetrope and its brothers, the semblance of motion could then be reproduced. But there were other, playful variations possible: the motion and the second could be enlarged or compressed — thus the rapture of slow motion or the giddy slapstick whirl that we now associate with silent pictures. Most lovely of all, forward time could run backward: the diver could arch, feet first, out of the water, inhaling the outburst of his own splash and then curving back though space to land on the diving board, on tip-toes. But the earnest Muybridge was not much interested in or amused by reverse motion, whereas many of the earliest poets of film (Buñuel, Vigo, Clair, Vertov) could not take their eyes off it, and were plainly re-vivified in their sense of the beauty of all motion by the solemn or surreal farce of having everything go backward.

It is the serious limitation of Solnit's book that strident theorizing (often at odds with her subtle eye for real insights) and a kind of California boosterism come together in an ecstatic vision of a world changed by Muybridge:

The story of what Muybridge accomplished with Stanford's support is a peculiarly Californian story. Much has been written about the artistic and literary modernism that was born in Paris, but only high culture was born there, though that high culture was a response to the pervasive alienations and liberations brought by industrialization. Another part of the modern world came from California, and this part was and is an amalgamation of technology, entertainment and what gets called lifestyle.... This book is about those years that followed upon that encounter between photographer and racehorse and about that man who seems in retrospect like a bullet shot through a book. His trajectory ripped through all the central stories of his time — the relationship to the natural world and the industrialization of the human world, the Indian wars, the new technologies and their impact on perception and consciousness. He is the man who split the second, as dramatic and far-reaching as the splitting of the atom.

That last comparison seems to me little more than literary, just as it is rather hurried to dismiss Paris as the venue of high cultural innovations. In the way that atoms would be split, Muybridge did not split the second. Instead he isolated and stilled fractions of a second, turning them into beauty, iconography, and the germ of narrative. But still photography had always been intrigued by those prospects, and Muybridge always saw the movement of photographs as a scientific or technological wonder, instead of a perceptual breakthrough. Nothing in Muybridge's life suggests that he had ever grasped the way in which movies began to displace life, began to make it theatrical or fictional, began to ask participants to be viewers. Those changes are profound, but Solnit never notices them.

Paris, let us admit, was the place where movies were first projected — just as, time and again, it has been the city where the most startling imaginative powers in film have been noticed. It was also the city that pioneered iron and steel work, underground railways, Cubism, and Surrealism. I live in San Francisco too, and I also love the West, but I have to admit that there are afternoons when Paris still seems the center of the world. You can rave about the innovative, mind-making role of Hollywood — but then you must admit how horribly archaic so many of its new films are.

All this does not mean that we have no need to attend to Eadweard Muybridge. Solnit assesses him in all his genres: as a photographer of the Modoc wars, as a landscape man, as the rapt assembler of so many sections of a meticulous yet unpopulated San Francisco, and then as the visionary of animal locomotion. In that process, Muybridge gathered over thirty thousand plates of men and women — many of them nude, some of them himself — and had the results published. He was surely right in doing so. For although these stills seem to wait for the slightest trigger to become animate, they are beautifully in their element, row upon row, as the stages of pointless exercise: a baseball pitcher pitching, a cricketer playing a shot.

In 1885, working at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Muybridge employed a twenty-year-old woman named Blanche Epler, naked, and handsome if not quite beautiful, for several magnificent sequences of ordinary motion. It is not that these pictures are erotic — indeed, they are impressive for how little sense of sexuality they possess — but still, for that moment in the Victorian age, there must have been those who were startled or troubled by this mixture of candor and science. It is here that Solnit reaches the very best level and tone of this book:

On the morning of October 16 [1885], Epler lies down and rises, kneels and prays, pours water from a pitcher, and ascends stairs with a lamp for the camera. It's a sequence that seems to begin with awakening and end with departing. Were these animated together they would present far more sophisticated narratives than, say, the first films of the Lumière brothers, which took a single action as their subject — a train arriving, workers leaving a factory, a baby being fed.

But in some ways Muybridge was far from film and theater: his models kept a kind of reserve even nude, even in the most intimate acts that connected them to his earlier photography. He photographed the impersonal, landscape, architecture, and groups engaged in action. He never made a portrait, and there was something curious in all his photographs of people, a sense of psychological distance, a failure to connect. The figures often seem abstracted, attuned neither to the photographer nor to each other. Pretty Blanche Epler with thick fair hair down to her waist was immeasurable distance away in her own thoughts, more a body than a person, not as women are bodies in pornography but as people are bodies in anatomical and medical texts. Unlike an actress, she was not emoting or expressing for the camera; she offered it only the motions of her body.

Here, and in many passages like this one, this book is haunting as well as frustrating — and maybe in some scattershot, roundabout way it brings life back to clocks and to journeys, just as it reminds us of the part of time and distance in beauty, and also in the murder and the pretty thorough annihilation of Flora Muybridge.

Try four weeks of the New Republic Digital absolutely free For nearly 90 years, the New Republic has provided its readers with an intelligent and rigorous examination of American politics, foreign policy, and culture. Today, we're proud to offer a faster, easier, and more economical way to enjoy the magazine — TNR Digital. Subscribe today and we'll give you 4 weeks absolutely free. That's less than 36 cents/week for every word of content available in the print version, a downloadable replica of the print magazine, and an array of special online-only features! Click here to sign up.