Photography and Spirit (review)

Using photography to record supernatural events, especially the practice known as "spirit photography" in which ghosts or spirits of the dead are somehow captured on film, has suddenly become a hot topic. More than a decade ago I wrote an essay on the subject for Patrice Petro's anthology Fugitive Images from Photography to Video (1995). Other than a few discussions aimed at collectors, I could not find a single essay on the topic that was not primarily engaged in defending or disputing the veracity of such images and their status as evidence of survival after death. Since that time there has been a veritable explosion of such articles and books, culminating in the recent 2005 exposition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (imported from Maison Europeenne de la Photographie in Paris), whose catalogue, The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, offers the most thorough account of this practice. Other recent publications, all of them beautifully illustrated (and several serving as catalogues for exhibitions) include Louis Kaplan, The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer; Martyn Joly, Faces of the Living Dead; Mark Durant and Jane Marsching, eds., Blur of the Unworldly; Alison Ferris, ed., The Disembodied Spirit; and Corey Keller, ed., Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible (which nicely places such photographs in the context of early scientific photography), as well as the publication reviewed here.

These recent works do not focus on the rather tiresome discussion of the veracity of such photographs, fully aware of the many cases of demonstrated fraud and of the often quite apparent techniques of superimposing, collage, and other methods available to produce such images (which Harvey's book details and illustrates at some length). Rather than examining such images as evidence of supernatural events, current scholars explore them as evidence of complex cultural practices. As silly as they may appear as evidence, such photographs reveal a great deal about the reception and use of new technologies and the often ambiguous structures of belief in an era of scientific skepticism. Further, the influence these photographs exert on contemporary artists reveals them as inspiring recent aesthetic modes. Most of the recent works noted above offer detailed new scholarship. The volume reviewed here serves more as a sort of overview of the topic.

As the book's author nicely puts it, the practice of spirit photography introduced in the mid-nineteenth century "allied modern technology to ancient beliefs" (p. 7). But these images did not simply stage a clash between the modern and the archaic. Rather they captured a transformation of the nature of belief in spirits. Harvey describes this encounter as uniting "two expressions of faith; one in the existence of invisible realities, the other in the camera's indifferent eye and unerring ability to arrest the truth." If the first belief was archaic, the second was modern. Spiritualism partly founded its religious beliefs on new scientific protocols of evidence. This new synthesis of two forms of faith constitutes the true fascination of this odd use of photography. Harvey explores photographs that purport to capture supernatural beings or events as cultural phenomenon and relates them to what he claims are the most dominant domains of modern culture: religion, science, and art.

Of course, these three cultural contexts interrelate, and Harvey undertakes to show how the iconography of each realm influences the nature of these supernatural photographs. Thus he traces the visual impact that relics (including the traditional Veil of Veronica or the controversial Shroud of Turin) had on photographs of visionary experience, as well as their visualization of the halos and auras derived from religious painting. But if religion supplied traditions of iconography, science offered a very different visual conception, that of recording traces that often do not resemble pictorial images at all. Photography's ability to capture the previously invisible—from the microscopic to the telescopic to the humanly imperceptible (such as X-rays)—all inspired spirit photography in its quest to record the invisible world of spirits. But this often led to abstraction rather than depiction. Harvey acknowledges the difference contributed...