Cart Search
submit Remember my login

Looking for a chapter event?

Past SPE Annual Conferences

Northeast Chapter Conference Schedule

print this page

Phantom Skies and Shifting Ground: Landscape, Culture, and Rephotography in Eadweard Muybridge's Illustrations of Central America

Saturday, October 29 - 10:30AM to 11:15PM

Phantom Skies and Shifting Ground responds to the largely unknown late 19th-century photographs of Central America by Eadweard Muybridge. It’s a collection of dark and moody pictures taken during a two-year expedition immediately following Muybridge's involvement in ascandalous murder trial. Guided by Muybridge's sophisticated but problematic combination prints that merge multiple negatives into seamless views, photographer Byron Wolfe and cultural geographer Dr. Scott Brady traced Muybridge's travels through Guatemala and Panama to create photographic and textual analyses of the sites, spaces, and cultures that Muybridge encountered. Through the practice of rephotography -- photographing the same subject from the same perspective -- Wolfe initiates a dialogue with Muybridge over a divide of 130 years. Attempting to reconcile Muybridge's constructed and altered views with his own visual interpretations, Wolfe provides one of the first critiques of rephotography as a practice entangled with ambiguity and impossibility.


Dr. Brady uses Muybridge’s photos as visual benchmarks for Latin American life and landscapes in the 1870s. He views Muybridge’s images as historical records of landscapes and seeks to trace how sites have evolved over the 130 years between Muybridge’s travels and his own.


Constantly questioning the reliability of observation and the stability of the geography, Phantom Skies locates the representation of place -- both then and now -- in invention, and reinvention.

speaker

Byron  Wolfe
Byron Wolfe

Email Sign Up

SPE email updates contain resources, news, and more!

About this piece

Comments about this piece

Dialogue and critique are important to the SPE mission.
Please join the conversation.

Exit Full Screen Mode