In 1875, after being acquitted in the killing of his wife’s lover, Eadweard Muybridge spent a year photographing along the Central American Pacific Coast, particularly in Guatemala and Panamá. He returned to California in 1876 and published a very limited number of albums of those photographs; eleven are known, each unique in size and scope. Phantom Skies + Shifting Ground, co-published by Radius Books with Temple University Press, takes that dispersed series as its subject. From 2007 to 2010, Byron Wolfe tracked down and catalogued every known Muybridge Central American photograph. Working with cultural geographer Scott Brady, he traveled to many of Muybridge’s original sites to rephotograph and study them.
The book moves among photographic collage, interpretive rephotography, illustrations, and essays. It sets nineteenth-century exposures beside present-day views of the same ground, but the method is not a simple before-and-after. Collage and interpretive rephotography let the project ask how landscape, culture, and photographic evidence are constructed and revised over time. The 228-page hardcover also incorporates a catalogue of every known Muybridge Central American picture, giving the volume a documentary and reference function alongside its visual argument.
Collector interest rests less on scarcity than on that pairing. The original albums were few and each different, which has kept the series difficult to see whole; the catalogue assembles in one place a body of work otherwise dispersed across institutions and private hands. The new fieldwork extends the story into the present, and the hybrid form—part visual essay, part scholarly catalogue—suits a project that is both historical and contemporary. A booklet accompanies the hardcover, though its contents are not documented here.
The subject is specific, yet the questions it raises about place, repetition, and the uses of photographic evidence are not. This is a book for readers engaged with rephotography, with the afterlives of nineteenth-century survey imagery, and with the photobook as a site of scholarship.
