The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (review)

The Perfect Medium is a catalogue issued in conjunction with a special exhibition of occult photography that was on view from 27 September through 31 December 2005 in the Harriette and Noel Levine Gallery and the Howard Gilman Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This exhibition was co-organized by the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, where it was originally held from 2 November 2004 through 6 February 2005; The Perfect Medium is a revised edition of the French catalogue Le troisième oeil: La photographie et l'occulte. The animating force behind this project was Pierre Apraxine, curator of the Gilman Paper Company Collection. Over the past three decades Apraxine has purchased over 8,500 photographs for the collection, which was recently acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Perfect Medium marks the end of Apraxine's tenure as curator, and it showcases some of his last purchases [1].

It may no longer seem necessary to question photography's relevance as an art form, as the Metropolitan Museum of Art legitimized the medium in 1928 when it accepted images from Alfred Stieglitz, yet this exhibition seems to resurrect older debates about the ontological status of the photographic image. The spiritualists' notion that the photograph could potentially provide physical evidence of the existence of spirits seems to echo the claims of Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, who similarly described the photograph as "a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask" [2]. This idea has been rejected by more recent critics, such as John Tagg, who asserts that there is no "ontological or semio-logical basis for the privileging of photography as a means of representation which renders a direct transcription of the real" [3]. Tom Gunning even identifies spirit photographs themselves as evidence of this "lack of tangible reference" [4]. Reviewers of the exhibition tend to avoid this problem by focusing on the more humorous aspects of the images. The New York Times reported, for example, that "It's the most hilarious, not to mention the most charming, exhibition the museum has done in years" [5]. The curators address the problem of indexicality more directly, however, by describing it as a purely historical variable.

The catalogue is organized into three sections: photographs of ghosts, photographs of fluids and photographs of mediums. While the images selected to represent each of these categories often seem fraudulent, the curators refrain from expressing opinions regarding their legitimacy. Apraxine and Schmit explain:

The traditional question of whether or not to believe in the occult will be set aside from the outset. The authors' position is precisely that of having no position, or, at least not in so Manichean a form.... To transpose such Manicheanism to photography would inevitably mean falling into the rhetoric of proof, of truth or lies, which has been largely discredited in the arena of photography discourse today (p. 14).

In contrast to the "aesthetic approach" or the "believer's approach," therefore, the authors describe their method as "resolutely historical," as they are primarily interested in the anthropological value of these images (p. 14). While some reviewers have interpreted this stance as "po-mo ooze" [6], it appears to me as an exemplary attempt to understand the context in which these images were originally produced and received. According to Apraxine and Schmit, such an approach was also necessary in order to do such a show. Schmit says, for example, "If I hadn't considered at least the possibility of it existing, I don't think I would have been interested in doing the exhibit" [7]. Apraxine's attitude is similarly ambiguous: "I believe you can see a ghost, but that doesn't mean I believe in ghosts" [8]. As this enigmatic statement makes clear, the relationship between belief and sight...