Spiritualist Photography

This article was originally published on my Typepad blog on November 12, 2012

At the end of last month, the Guardian Blog posted an article by Ranjit Dhaliwal on nineteenth century spiritualist photography. It was an appropriate subject for a Halloween post. 

Spiritualist photography is best known in the U.S. through the work of a William H. Mumler, who was publicly exposed as a charlatan in a sensational trial in NYC that featured testimony against Mumler by showman P.T. Barnum (whose own Wikipedia entry describes him as a "scam artist"). Probably Mumler's greatest claim to fame was his photo of Mary Todd Lincoln with the "ghost" of Abraham Lincoln by her side. This, like all his other photos, was faked.

In the U.K., the best known practitioner of spiritualist photography was William Hope. Although he too was exposed as a fraud, this time by psychic researcher Harry Price, Hope continued to have many supporters, including Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle who hoped to communicate with the spirits of his dead wife and children.

Several years ago, the Metropolitan Museum had a fascinating exhibit of spiritualist photography, with accompanying catalog, entitled The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult. What's fascinating is that one of the curators who put that show together, Pierre Apraxine, gave the impression in a NY Times interview at the time that he was more open minded about the existence of the spirit world than might have been expected. Although he described himself as "a noncommitted observer," he also stated at another point in the interview: "I believe you can see a ghost, but that doesn't mean I believe in ghosts."

Coincidentally, the Met Museum is now currently hosting another show in a similar vein, this one entitled "Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop." The current show, which I have not yet had a chance to view, "traces the history of manipulated photography from the 1840s through the early 1990s." It primarily concerns itself with the use of manual techniques, rather than digital, to manipulate the content of a photograph.

All this brings to mind the quote by photographer Lewis Hine: "While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph."