Spirit Photography: Past and Present

Spirit Photography: Past and Present

Introduction

In the 1850s there were various descriptions of translucent likenesses of dead people appearing on photographs. But it was an American, William Mumler (d. 1884), who in 1869 turned spirit photography into a business. He offered to photograph his clients in the company of one or more ghosts, invisible when the exposure was made but discernible on the developed photograph. The contemporary spiritualism craze in the USA contributed to Mumler's success and the proliferation of photographic mediums. The first European ones, Frederick Hudson in London and Jean Buguet in Paris, appeared at the beginning of the 1870s. This first, essentially commercial, phase of spirit photography was accompanied by various processes which, according to their outcomes, either boosted or discredited the practice. But a strong revival was prompted by the millions of deaths in the First World War and families' desperation to make contact with their loved ones. It was especially strong in England, associated with mediums like William Hope (d. 1932)—leader of the 'Crewe circle' and Emma Deane, and personalities such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), and was experimentally rather than commercially orientated. Remnants of it persist today. But although the aim is still to capture spirit images, modern media such as television and the Internet are favoured.

Discussion

Not Long after the Invention of the photographic process in the 19th-century, it was realized that photography could be used to stop time and allow people to reach back into the past, serving much the same function as memory had served in the past. The images of those who had died could be preserved through the technology of photography. Almost concurrently with the development of photography, the phenomenon of spiritualism sought to use photos as a technological means of gaining access to the departed. Through the seance, spiritualists attempted to contact and even communicate with the dead. Spiritualists saw themselves operating in a scientific context and a technological framework. It was almost inevitable that spiritualism and photography would combine in the form of spirit photography. In an era fascinated with both science and death, spirit photography provided a scientific means of resurrecting the dead.

That the spiritualists had developed a cult of science is exemplified by the appearance of many luminaries from the history of scientific endeavor during the seances carried out by spiritualist circles. For example it was not unusual for spiritualists to conjure up the spirit of Galileo or Isaac Newton. But, after all, these were American spiritualists, and so it was only fitting that the star of many seances was the father of American science, Benjamin Franklin. Franklin's appearances were in frequent that a type of mythology of the Franklin spirit developed among spiritualists, thus reassuring them that their scientific approach to the spirit world was working.

Andrew Jackson Davis even credited Franklin with inventing from beyond the grave a celestial telegraph. This led one spiritualist to write that Franklin and a host of floating zephyrs of heaven were still benefiting ...