My best friend just took a fancy job at Stanford University in California, so while she and her husband are out there looking for a place to call home, I am house-sitting their soon-to-be sold home for them.
I settled in for a bit of reading, with a book I found at my new favorite bookstore, Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Legacy Village (Cleveland).The book is: River of Shadows -Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit (ISBN 0142004103).
Muybridge was the "father" of instantaneous motion photography. Solnit posits that he is also the father of cinema, and by a complicated, albeit fascinating chain of events, she argues that he is the father of the whole "modern" world that we live in, and the manner in which we perceive it. The book is a wonderful history of early western exploration, photography, cinema, Native American relations, and the effects of the railroad not only on opening up the country, but the effect it had on time, and on man's perception of time.
These are all topics I find intriguing in and of themselves, and it takes place in my favorite time period...but one of the major characters in this tale is LELAND STANFORD. This book is also a history of Stanford University, and California history! Very strange how life will lead you to connections like these...
And by the way...if you think of Muybridge as just a "motion photographer", (if you think of him at all) there is a world waiting to be discovered! Not only was he a gifted landscape and panoramic photographer - he was also a murderer! Ah, those wacky, crazy days of yore...
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