Photography and the occult
“Ghosts, to make themselves manifest,” wrote Edith Wharton, “require two conditions abhorrent to the modern mind: silence and continuity.” In our digital age, however, they revel in noise and impermanence and technology, haunting films, reality television shows, plays, and photographic exhibitions alike.
Consider TV shows like Most Haunted and Ghost Hunters — the latter, featuring paranormal sleuths-cum-plumbers (This Old House meets The Blair Witch Project). Spirits hover in contemporary artwork ranging from Susan Collins’s pixelated hauntings to Chrysanne Stathacos’s Polaroid auras. Adding to the corpus of sepia are the influx of technologically haunted Asian horror films and their English-language remakes — most recently, Masayuki Ochiai’s 2008 Shutter — as well as the playwright Richard Foreman’s most recent mixed-media production, Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland. Alongside the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2005 exhibit “The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult,” these photographic hauntings remind us that the ghost in the machine has been present since the medium’s inception. It also raises the question, however, of why we keep reverting to Victorian notions of death and photography.
Photography, according to Susan Sontag, “furnishes evidence.” These days, the evidence keeps piling up. The medium was hailed as a documentary science when it was invented; thus, Charles Baudelaire described “the absolute material accuracy” of photographs, and the social photographer Lewis W. Hine discussed how “the average person believes that the photograph cannot falsify.” Yet the origins of the “black art” of photography lie equally with the occult and science, in alchemy, and the development of the camera obscura.
In the fourth century BC, Aristotle recommended using a prototype of the camera obscura, or dark room — basically, a box with a pinhole in it through which an image of the outside world appears upside down — to view eclipses without burning the retinas. The device could not only enable one to see more of the natural world, it could also be manipulated to show the supernatural. In the 16th century, Martin Luther complained about a charlatan named Faust (precursor to Marlowe’s and Goethe’s Promethean figures) who called the Devil his “brother-in-law” and apparently employed some manner of magic lantern or camera obscura to conjure up spirits of the dead to awed audiences. Likewise, when Giovanni Battista della Porta used a room-size camera obscura in which to project images before startled observers, he was put on trial for witchcraft.
The first photographs emerged from a desire to fix the preternatural images that appeared within the camera obscura. The first permanent photograph was “View From the Window at Le Gras,” captured on pewter by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826. Like the later daguerreotypes, it had a mirrorlike glimmer to it and was irreproducible. In these early images, humans appeared like ghosts, embodying Edmund Burke’s dictum in A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful that “to make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary.” Because of the long exposure needed to produce these images and the impossibility of human subjects remaining absolutely still, early photos of people are themselves otherworldly looking, with the aesthetically pleasing “slight burr” described by Lady Elizabeth Eastlake. Against a backdrop of solid, unmoving buildings, human figures would appear blurry and insubstantial, like Latimer’s vision of Prague in George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil:
“The city looked so thirsty that the broad river seemed to me a sheet of metal; and the blackened statues, as I passed under their blank gaze, along the unending bridge, with their ancient garments and their saintly crowns, seemed to me the real inhabitants and owners of this place, while the busy, trivial men and women, hurrying to and fro, were a swarm of ephemeral visitants infesting it for a day.”
Of course, there’s something inherently creepy about “taking” someone’s photograph in the first place. In The Golden Bough, James George Frazer gathered stories from around the world of people terrified of their own reflections and photographs, and doppelgangers and automatons are the very essence of Freud’s Uncanny. Perhaps for that reason, spirit photography has been around almost as long as photography itself. All photographs are epitaphs, both freezing and elegizing time. Roland Barthes famously pointed out “that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.”
The first spirit photograph was taken by an American named William H. Mumler in 1861 when he tried to take a self-portrait and ended up inexplicably sharing the frame with his dead cousin. He opened up for business soon after and for a time made a killing preying on the mid-19th-century obsession with death and mourning. His most famous spirit photograph was of Mary Todd Lincoln haunted by the specter of her newly assassinated husband, whose spectral arm rested on her shoulder comfortingly. (Lincoln had foreseen his own death when he dreamed just before his assassination of attending his own funeral and gazing down at his doppelganger in the coffin.)
I first encountered Victorian spirit photography at the 2005 Metropolitan Museum show. At the time, I found the images amusingly stagy and fantastically faked. There was a striking lack of consistency to the images, though they all adhered to various clichés of the spectral harking back to at least the Middle Ages: shrouds, skulls, wan forms, semi-transparency, eerily indistinct visages, balls of glowing energy. There were ectoplasms obviously composed of cheesecloth and hanging from nipples, thighs, and nostrils (as though trying to stanch bloody noses). The ectoplasm was as kitschy and disgusting, in its way, as Slimer in Ghostbusters, and just as unbelievable.
There were also disembodied heads, often tilted at comical angles; numinous Gibson Girl illustrations shimmering in the air above credulous sitters; preternatural orbs and streaks; fluidic nimbuses; electrified effluvia; and wan floating specters either artfully shrouded or laughably stolid in Victorian woolens.
The most haunting to me were those images consciously crafted to look fake and mock the whole phantasmagoric endeavor, such as Eugène Thiébault’s doubly exposed photograph from 1863 titled “Henri Robin and a Specter” or the Anonymous 1890 “The Ghost of Bernadette Soubirous.”
In the former, Henri Robin re-enacted his two-way mirror show in which he lampooned spiritualism and made “specters” appear before amused audiences. To mock spiritualism in an age of science, Robin — sideburns bristling, arms swept melodramatically aloft — appears to be encircled by the specter of Death, a skeleton attired in sooty shrouds. The specter seized him before a Faustian set of tomes; on the table, an hourglass, pistol, and cartes-de-visite complete the tableau vivant of haunting. In the other photograph, five sequential images of a ghostly Bernadette Soubirous fade into a wall like a paranormal experiment by Eadweard J. Muybridge, who in 1878 managed to photograph a sequence of images of a horse in motion, a precursor to film.
Perhaps I preferred the obvious hoaxes to the purported “evidence” of haunting because they were carefully crafted and placed — not a sleight of hand done in a photographer’s studio by a hack to con a widow into believing her departed husband was hovering significantly in the air behind her head, made visible only through the magic of his lens. They were more of a conscious effort to show the affinity between art and artifice, a connection that has recently inspired contemporary artists. In a kitschy 2004 DVD installation titled “The Ideoplastic Materializations of Eva C.,” for example, Zoe Beloff recreated the séances of an Edwardian medium, cheesy ectoplasm and all.
However unrealistic many of the images appear to us today, Victorian spirit photography was an attempt to merge science and spiritualism, fact and faith. If microscopes, X-rays, ultraviolet rays, and telegraphs could convey other frequencies, the reasoning went, so, too, could photographs capture supersensible entities invisible to the naked eye. The death toll of the Civil War, the high mortality rate of the Victorians, Queen Victoria’s own preoccupation with the death of her husband, Prince Albert, the crisis of faith, and the prevalence of such memento mori as mourning rings and posthumous portraits reveal the midto late-19th-century’s obsession with death and the need to verify evidence of the afterlife. The Rev. H.R. Haweis echoed a common Victorian belief when he wrote in The Veil Lifted, “Photograph me a ghost; chemicals have no fancies, plates don’t get nervous, and lenses tell no lies!” That paradox has been present from the earliest days of photography: on the one hand, the belief that these pictures drawn by the sun were images of reality, and on the other hand, the linking of the medium with the otherworldly. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — inventor of that exemplar of ratiocination, Sherlock Holmes — was also a passionate defender of fairy photographs and spirit photography (and even obligingly appeared in a couple of posthumous photographs himself). Several critics have noted the affinity of spiritualistic and photographic terminology — medium, sensitive, darkroom — and point out that both spiritualism and Kodak hail from the same place: Rochester, N.Y.
But it is easy to laugh at the credulity and bad special effects of a past era. When I was a child, a glowing orange silhouette of a woman kneeling by my brother and me in an Easter photo seemed legitimately a spectral portrait. We expect our spirits to be vaguer now, no longer making recognition of the visages of our departed a condition for the authenticity of a photographic haunting. Anthropomorphic halations, streaks of light, or eerily faint faces hovering at the edges of pictures seem evidence of the uncanny, and EVP’s — or Electronic Voice Phenomena — seem more believable if they record mere traces and suggestions of human voices. After all, the white-noise demon in Poltergeist would have been a lot less terrifying if someone had gone and fixed the tracking. For the Victorians, however, distinctness was often a way to prove the authenticity of a spirit photograph: If you could recognize Uncle Harold’s face, it must be legitimate. In fact, when the French spirit photographer Édouard Isidore Buguet admitted during his trial to having faked his spirit photographs, countless witnesses stepped forward protesting otherwise and insisting he had, in fact, captured, Uncle Harold.
Despite our supposedly superior knowledge that images can be Photoshopped, airbrushed, morphed, avatared, or otherwise digitally enhanced in computer photo-manipulation programs, there is an increased interest in capturing spirits on film and in the arts. In 2008, I attended Richard Foreman’s mixed-media production, Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland, a downtown theater and film spectacle in St. Mark’s Church in Manhattan’s East Village. Foreman, a MacArthur genius who designs his own sets, papered the walls of his set in Victorian spirit photographs. The striped, askew, slightly morbid Alice in Wonderland-esque set looked like a dream home for a subscriber to the Gothic & Lolita Bible. It also featured double screens upon which he projected identical videos of Japanese or English performers intoning such phrases as, “Do not forget those who travel to a place from which there is no return.” Foreman explained that theater is “a ‘land of death’ where actions are not ‘alive’ but repeated by rote.” The same could apply to film.
Following Hideo Nakata’s 1998 film Ringu and the English-language remake, The Ring, films such as The Grudge, The Eye, and Shutter have swept theaters in America. Their themes, and perhaps their resonance, stem from vaguely menacing technologies like surveillance tapes and cryptic text messages creeping across cellphone readouts. Eerie y urei — vengeful spirits trapped in the moment of violent death, with their demonically disheveled black hair, bloodless limbs, and raccoon eyes — have resonance in a fearful world where calamity is caught on a pocket Samsung and impersonally posted on YouTube.
Interestingly, in the recent Shutter (as with an unsettling X-Files episode from season four called “Unruhe”), it is the older technology of Polaroids that furnishes evidence, producing as it does single images, much as the first daguerreotypes that could not be replicated. The reasoning is, “You can’t fake a Polaroid.” This accounts in part for the popularity of that soused extramundane “Thoughtographer” Ted Serios in the 1960s, who would down cases of beer and think hard at his Polaroid camera until the little pictures in his head (rockets, cars, a naked Marilyn Monroe) appeared on the film like a fantasy sequence with Homer Simpson. It was obviously absurd — and yet, still unexplained.
Like photography, film is a haunted medium. Just think of such urban legends as the hanging munchkin in The Wizard of Oz or the boy specter in Three Men and a Baby. More recently, when filming the 2004 Thai film Shutter about spirit photography (whose English remake by the same name was released in 2008), the directors described allegedly catching the spirit of a dead cyclist while shooting a crash scene. “Personally,” said Parkpoom Wongpoom, one of the directors, “I do believe spirits are real. They are everywhere, and pictures could be a very good proof that they do exist.”
Still, the question remains: Shouldn’t we know better? Darkrooms have given way to photo-editing “dimrooms,” and even younger moviegoers readily grasp that if you can make Shrek with a computer, you can probably make the guys in 300, too. The terminology of photo manipulation itself bespeaks its artifice: paintbrush, airbrush, pencil, crop, sketch, skew, color saturate, retouch, composite. Photography has returned to the language of painting, and the typological tableaux vivants of the Victorian age no longer seem so foreign to us now.
Yet still we are haunted. Although computers should be suprarational and act only as they are instructed to, they obviously don’t; such terms as “ghost image” seem perfectly fitting in our technological age. Digital photographs are more ghostly than their analog counterparts — images not even captured on celluloid, but in pixels, bits of binary information like the raps and silences of a Victorian séance. Now we can send images instantly across the world in a digital telepathy. The digital photographs glowing on an LCD screen are even further from the world than when they were captured on silver halide crystals. The greater our technological advance, the greater our haunting.
As if providing an afterward to Edith Wharton’s observations about ghostly conditions, the late Jacques Derrida observed in Ken McMullen’s 1983 film Ghost Dance, “modern developments in technology and telecommunication, instead of diminishing the realm of ghosts … enhance the power of ghosts and their ability to haunt us.”
Amy Leal is a visiting assistant professor of English at Claremont McKenna College and is finishing a book on John Keats.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 22, Page B10