Apply Baudrillard's Theories Of Simulation And Simulacra To Solnit's River Of Shadows

Introduction

This paper will put focus on applying the theories of Simulation and Simulacra, presented by Jean Baudrillard, on Rebecca Solnit's River of Shadows. Furthermore, the paper will put focus on Edward Muybridge's innovations in photographic techniques and motion studies in light of the ethical and moral implications of Jean Baudrillard's theories.

Jean Baudrillard was born on 27 July 1929 at Reims and died on 6 March 2007 in Paris, is a critical intellectual, sociologist and philosopher French. Author of system objects and the consumer society, it is the source of a protean work, which will continue to evolve for nearly forty years, and eventually focus on the concept of "loss of reality" (Hegarty, Paul, p. 33).

Rebecca Solnit was born in 1961 in California. The essayist and historian for museums and worked as an editor and freelance writer since 1988. In her essays she traces thematic connections of art and cultural history and provides rich evidence parallels the immediate present and forth to contemporary political activism.

Edward Muybridge was a British photographer and pioneer of the photographic technique. Due to series of photographs and shooting with studies of human and animal movement process, he is known as one of the most important representatives of early chrono-photography.

Discussion

Rebecca Solnit's River of Shadows

The world as we know it today began in California in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a man named Edward Muybridge was there for many" and opens the blurb this new book by Rebecca Solnit, author of several books already famous in California and the West as well as a history of walking (Wanderlust) (Solnit, p. 58-80). Muybridge is, of course, father (American) film and the analyst of human and animal locomotion, incidentally one of the greatest photographers of the American West in the 19th century, but while each of these roles has often been outclassed in the historiography, his career somewhat erratic and glazed by various sordid incidents, including the murder of the lover of his young wife, had never, until now, received a powerful light. This book is not, however, a biography, or it's an "eco-biography", consumer version of a model "eco-critique" which, blending ecology, regionalism and cultural studies, has been increasingly successful in the States U.S., especially in the West (Solnit, p. 58-80).

Solnit's thesis is simple: its geological chrono-photographic his experiences on the horse of the West Leland Stanford, ...