1. Solnit’s “River of Shadows” is a very detailed account of photography’s effect on time and space as well as the economy of the US at the time. In the first section of the reading, there is a great amount of discussion on the shrinking of space. In addition to talking about photography, she mentions how the railroad “shrunk” space for travellers and “transformed the experience” (53). This section focuses on the idea of relative time by describing how the human experience of time and space changed. Time became a measure of speed; how far you could go in a given time. Distances that people use to walk in days were now covered in hours, and with the advances in technology came the desire to move faster. Now that people were capable of higher speeds, more could be accomplished and time suddenly became more valuable. It is interesting to note how humans always strive for the fastest route; even today, when planning a flight across the US, the idea of having a lay over seems unnecessary. Why take the slow option when you are capable of something faster?
2. People also began to see the extent of time with the findings of geologists, which comes as a surprising side note in Solnit’s reading. Through dating of the Earth, geologists concluded that Earth was much older than the Bible depicted, although the exact dates were still unknown (53). So while the telegraph and railroads quickened the pace of human life, geology made the appearance of life even shorter. Now that they knew how long geological processes took, it made human existance seem so short and unimportant. The Bible on the other hand had made human life the center and importance of the Earth’s life, which is how people still think today. Rarely does anyone want to consider the slower processes, since we as humans simply cannot see it.
3. Another interesting idea that Solnit mentioned was the fact that the camera could now capture “what had always been present but never seen” (59). Cameras are capable of capturing a moment in time, but not an entire motion. This would seem like something new and “exotic” as Solnit describes it, allowing people to get a different view on the world. Muybridge’s sequence of photos also were able to capture a movement, not just a moment, making it seem like technology could out perform the human mind.
4. Overall, Solnit describes the advancements in science and film as progress, but her tone suggests that she is hesitant to let go of the human side to interpretating life at a different speed. Or perhaps, the things she states simply makes the reader realize what our minds have been subconsciously thinking. The way she describes how the railroad made the landscape become a blur had a dissappointed tone. With our new technology, are we forgetting to slow down and see the world for all that it is?
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In the first paragraph Christina provides a uniform summary of a complicated idea about the shrinkage of space. To continue her argument of “humans striving for the fastest route,” I believe that by doing this humans are also striving to beat nature. With the technology of railroads and telegraphs humans “exceeded the fastest speed of bird, beast, and man...human beings were no longer contained within nature” (56). Furthermore, Christina talks about the invention of new camera technology in paragraph three, and mentions that Solnit refers to this as new and “exotic.” Continuing, I believe this is part of the human race with nature because Muybridge’s first photographs of the horse were primarily used to understand how nature works. They focused on every detail of their gallop—“make [them] more like a machine. A machine must first be imagined and understood before it can be set to work, while nature can be utilized for millennia without giving away its secrets” (63). Muybridge was helping decipher the secrets of nature and unintentionally began the human struggle to scientifically, and quantitatively explain the forces, secrets, and powers of nature. Thus, I believe in this time period man was not only striving to shrink time and space for personal, monetary, and capitalistic benefits, but, also he wanted to rise above something almost divine—nature itself.
Alina Goldenberg
In response to the first paragraph, I agree with what she is saying about how time became transformed-- from distance to speed, and how it became more valuable because it became more tangible. I think however, that you can go further with what 'time' became to people during the Industrial Revolution as well as the age of photography. Time not only became concrete to humans but it became malleable and something to manipulate, as shown by Solnit when she says "the restlessness that regarded the unknown as a challenge rather than a danger, time as something to speed up or speed through" (54). Man made "photography had frozen the river of time" (55). All things in life could only be experienced in the past, present, and future before the new technology, but when it was introduced they became intertwined---man could actually capture a moment in time.
I think that while she makes a good point about the tone of the writing as a whole, it leaves out an important aspect of the piece: the idea that for the first time, 'time' was finally seen from different points of view. The motion pictures "made it possible to step in the same river twice...almost to stop living where you were and start living in other places or other times". The idea of relativity--seen obviously in Einstein's theory, but also with the creation of the railroad and the changing idea of distance as a measure of time.
Solnit also speaks of photography as "only portray[ing]the slow world the still world" (55). Is she stating that the world of time could now be separated into two halves? the slow and the fast, the real---being the world that we physically inhabit, and the surreal--the world that we capture?
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