Un fiume di ombre

In 1872, a man photographed a horse. It may seem a trivial act, but it marked the beginning of a revolution destined to change our perception of time and space. The man behind it was a figure as ambitious as he was enigmatic: Eadweard Muybridge, a brilliant landscape photographer and tireless experimenter who sought to ‘split the second’ – that is, to open a breach in time to reveal what the eye cannot isolate: movement.
Photography, after all, was born and developed in step with a world that lives, travels and communicates at an accelerated pace, an expanding world made smaller by the telegraph and the railway. And it is no coincidence that the man funding those studies on movement was none other than Leland Stanford, owner of Occident – the champion trotter immortalised in Muybridge’s chronophotographs – and magnate of the Central Pacific Railroad. Not just any patron, but the very embodiment of the tensions between capital, private interests and progress that animated late-nineteenth-century America, and in particular California, the land of dreams reaching towards the future.
Un fiume di ombre is not merely the story of a life; it is the account of a technological and cultural gamble. The breathtaking landscapes of Yosemite Valley and the views of San Francisco, created by ‘flaying the city’ and flattening it like an animal’s hide, are not mere backdrops; they are stages on a journey leading to the snapshot and – shortly thereafter – to cinema and the media industries. Rebecca Solnit paints a panorama which, like the grand urban vistas for which Muybridge was famous, weaves together different times and perspectives into a single vision, with a gaze that, starting with a horse, traces the gold rush, delves into the fractured world of Native Americans and reaches as far as Hollywood and Silicon Valley.