Abstract

This article discusses the image of the ghost as adapted by and to photography. It focuses on the evolution of the photographic ghost in relation to a distinctive manifestation of psychic photography (or spirit photography) prevalent during the early twentieth century. Psychic investigators observed that in some photographs the faces of spirits that developed on the glass-plate negatives appeared to have been handmade.1 More specifically, they looked like collages, composed of fragments of existing portrait photographs and prints, and of everyday materials, re-photographed, and superimposed on the plate in the manner of a double-exposure (Fig. 1). Several notable investigators advocated that this phenomenon need not be construed as evidence of fakery. There was another explanation: that psychic photographs contained portraits not of but by disincarnate souls, made from images drawn from the Spiritualist medium’s or the spirit’s visual memories of photographs of themselves, others, and objects, which were assembled, reproduced, and imprinted upon the photographic plate. Thus, psychic photographs were interpreted as being fabricated artefacts, born of an interactive collaboration between disincarnate and embodied consciousness, created (somehow) in the ether or a psychic aura, mediated via the camera (in some cases), and made tangible on the sensitized emulsion. This paper examines the unique and overlooked interaction between science and spirit, apparatus and appearances, and matter and minds, involving and connecting attendant and (purportedly) remote psyches.