"...nature was equally a kind of time or a pace, the pace of a person walking, of water flowing in a river, of seasons, of time told from the sky rather than electrical signals. Natural meant not where you were but how you moved through it, and a woman drifting across London on foot could attain certain harmonies not available to those speeding across the prairie on the express train."   

—Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West

On the evening of October 13, the fall iteration of the Wallach Division’s Art and Artists Book Club met on Zoom, with readers joining in from Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx; upstate in New Paltz; a patio in Santa Fe; a campground in California; a living room in Hawaii; and from Sicily and Mumbai.

The conversation on River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, written by the inimitable Rebecca Solnit, began with the art librarians sharing highlights from the Wallach Division’s vast holdings of early photography in the Digital Collections. We looked at beautiful, Edenic images from one of the founders of the American landscape genre, Carleton Watkins, and the vertiginous, wild, and “shadowy” stereoscopic views of Yosemite Valley from Eadweard Muybridge. Though Muybridge’s magnum opus, the 1887 Animal Locomotion studies, is not digitized, we were able to invite our readers to join us in the Prints and Photographs Study Room via an iPad, where the prints were displayed on the reading tables alongside his immense 360-degree Panorama of San Francisco—so delicate that it is rarely taken out for viewing.

Much like the book itself, Book Club readers were extremely curious with far-ranging insights, and in the hour together we carved out a unique landscape upon which we roamed. The terrain included: memory and interpretation; identity and the recreation of identity; Chinese landscape painting; rushing water as a subject and metaphor; the Buddhist idea of focal attention and global awareness; Spiritualists and the Ghost Dance as a technology; the book as a literary panorama; the book as an “inverted biography;” and finally, to deep attention and “slow seeing.”

Like rivers, one never steps into the same book twice. As a librarian, it was an exciting experience to see how dialoguing and questioning contribute to the meeting of many minds around the central themes of the book, and how much more revealing a subject can be when we stay there to inquire. Rebecca Solnit affirms this with (from a passage that helped us conclude the evening): “it takes a long exposure, generally, for something to make an impression.”   

River of Shadows was selected by vote after the summer iteration of the Art and Artists Book Club that focused on Blake Gopnik’s new biography, Warhol (which had featured a Q&A with the author)! We look forward to our next selection and are always open to suggestions (please email us at art@nypl.org with them!). And stay tuned!