photography

[Dave Monroe]

>From Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the
Technological Wild West (New York: Viking, 2003), Ch. 1, "The
Annihiliation of Time and Space," pp. 1-24 ...

... the essayist and judge Oliver Wendell Holmes exulted over the way
photographs of the material world seemed to eclipse their subjects:
"Form is henceforth divorced from matter.  n fact, matter as a visible
object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which
form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken
from different points of view, and that is all we want of it. Pull it
down or burn it up if you please.  Matter in large masses must always
be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable. We have got the
fruit of creation now, and need not trouble ourselves with the core."
In Holmes's account, this dematerialization was liberatory.
"Everything that is solid dissolves into air," said Marx of that
uncertain era, and Holmes thought that dissolving into air was
wonderful, that his generation would rise up like birds into that
thinner medium, with a new freedom to see the whole glorious
nineteenth-century world as a bird in flight might see it, as small
pictures of things far away.

[...]

One way to describe this transformation of the world whose great
accelerations came in the 1830s, the 1870s, and the age of the
computer is as increasing abstraction. Those carried along on
technology's currents were less connected to local places, to the
earth itself, to the limitations of the body and biology, to the
malleability of memory and imagination.  They were moving into a world
where places were being homogenized, where a network of machines and
the corporations behind them were dispelling the independence of
wilderness, of remoteness, of local culture, a world that was
experienced more and more as information and images. It was as though
they sacrificed the near to gain the far.  (pp. 21-2)

http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780142004104,00.html

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0308&msg=84831