Wide Angle: Eadweard Muybridge, the Pacific Coast, and Trans-Indigenous Representation

Eadweard Muybridge's Pacific Coast photographs provide an important site for investigating Victorian visual practices of the “wide.” They do not simply expand a referential frame to encompass novel subjects; they also, and more critically, register powerful narratives temporality modernity. This essay's analysis “wide” as incipient concept critical spatiality is set against familiar temporal dimension long nineteenth century (a false ultimately unproductive opposition). Rather, it places these two concerns in some tension with each other, though argument less about periodicity than representation timescales nineteenth-century media. In photographs, thinking representational possibilities width impossible without also confronting temporality. The are both explorations artifacts influential medium prompts reconsider politico-economic networks that were central progress expeditionary photography itself.