Ghost photography: history of a practice

  • 2019
Spiritual photography by Mumler, National Media Museum.

Over the centuries, ghosts have been perceived and explained in different ways by different societies and cultural movements. In the spectrum has been the soul of the furious dead who seeks revenge for a violent or premature death or who, unable to rest for something left incomplete in life, tries to remedy him from his spectral condition. The spirit has also been perceived as what remains of the individual after death, his immortal part that, being able to be evoked by necromancers and experts in the occult arts, can still appear before the living and reveal some of the mysteries of the afterlife. The ghost has even been perceived as the imprint of the human experience that is imprinted in the places where they have taken place, violent, violent or emotionally charged events, and that are periodically reproduced as scenes from a movie on a movie screen. . But can spiritual photography prove its existence?

For centuries, disciplines such as theology, philosophy and science have provided arguments to sustain or repudiate the existence of the soul. First-hand testimonials, popular legends, axioms, authority arguments and budgets of all kinds have been used to sustain each position, but the arrival of the 19th century and the rise of industrialization, chemistry and new technologies will have to be awaited so that Start attempts to prove the real existence of the soul and the Hereafter through photography.

Through the application of image capture and fixation techniques, which were still being experienced then, the spiritual field sought to prove the real existence of the soul after death. But what is true in spectral photography? Is it possible to use it to match the existence of the spirit? Is it still used today in parapsychological research?

Photograph by John J. Glover with his mother's ghost, taken by William H. Mumler. National Media Museum

Portraying ghosts: the dawn of a technique

Ghost photography, also known as spiritual photography, emerges almost simultaneously with the daguerreotype. The long exposure times required by the first photographs, in which the portrayed was forced to remain motionless and without changing his position for a long time, favored that the image could be moved, unfocused or strangely disturbed. For the same reason, it was not uncommon for the figure of a servant, a husband or a clueless child to sneak in the photo if they crossed the camera's lens during the exhibition.

We will have to wait until 1861 for the American engraver William H. Mumler to accidentally discover that, through double exposure, a spectral photographic effect can be achieved . Although only one year before another character, W. Campbell, would have photographed what appeared to be the spirit of a child sitting on a chair, Mumler will be the real driver of ghost photography.

The pioneers of photography were aware of the strange effects that could be obtained by altering the time and manner of the exhibition, and soon revealed in specialized publications the way to produce them voluntarily. In his book Photographic Amusements, published in 1896, Walter Woodbury revealed the technique to obtain the phantom effect in the photographs:

It is very easy to take pictures of quite convincing ghosts First, we have to prepare our "ghost" by putting a white sheet on someone. Then, we will place both the client and the ghost in the appropriate position, and proceed to expose them [to the camera] as usual. Then, we will leave everything as it is and we will remove the ghost from the scene, after which we will continue with the exhibition. When revealing the film, we will find that the client and his background are clearly exposed and that, thanks to the double exposure, only a weak image of the ghost is perceived through which the background objects are shown.

Spiritist S ance made in 1920. Photograph by William Hope.

Reality or deception? The dangers of ghost photography

The purpose of these spectral images created ad hoc should, initially, be to entertain and cause wonder in a period in which visual spectacles such as dioramas, gyroscopes and panoramas They were busy and loved by the public. However, William H. Mumler understood the possibilities of profit that spiritual photography offered, and embarked on a career marked by fraud. Mumler, like the photographers William Hope and Frederick Hudson, among others, was presented as a medium capable of evoking the spirit of the deceased and expressing it on the photographic plate .

Wives, mothers and brothers who wished to see their deceased loved ones, who needed a definitive proof of the soul's existence, turned to these pseudo-mediums in search of comfort. Although they paid dearly for the illusion of seeing their desire confirmed, the act of possessing that ghostly photograph helped them in the process of accepting death. It is not in vain that spiritual photography arises in the same period in which post-mortem photography is practiced, a practice that is incorporated into the more traditional forms of celebration Mourning and worship of the deceased's memory.

Mumler opened the way for photography to be used as a valid medium in psychic research. In fact, some nineteenth-century mediums would use photography to portray supernatural entities during their experiences and thus verify the reality of experience in a culture interested in both death and mourning as well as spiritualism .

Mary Lincoln pictured alongside the alleged spirit of her husband, Abraham Lincoln. Photograph by William H. Mumler, National Media Museum.

Spiritualism is a religious movement that presupposes the existence of a life after death in which the deceased would carry out a constant process of learning and growth. According to this philosophy, spirits would also have the ability and willingness to contact the living and guide them on their way. In the practice of spiritualism, therefore, it seeks to connect with these wise spirits through mediums in order to perfect the ethical component of humanity. It is in this search to prove the veracity and worth of contact with the other side where the relevance of spiritual photography must be placed throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Light, soul, energy: what does ghost photography portray?

Photography was a key technical advance in the gradual boom that would be experienced by paranormal, spiritual, occult and mystical investigations. Together with video cameras, digital recorders and computer equipment, photography is still used by ghost hunters and parapsychologists to capture the presence of possible spectral forms. However, today as yesterday, the veracity of many of the phantom photographs analyzed by experts has been denied and presented as the product of a hoax.

Floating orbs of light have been interpreted as specks of dust or moisture particles captured by the camera lens. Diffuse mists and light forms are explainable by the dominant atmospheric conditions during image capture. In fact, researchers abound that, like the American Kenny Biddle, are dedicated to unmasking such fraudulent operations and unraveling the physical causes that explain the appearance of these bursts of light, these deformed profiles and those luminous orbs in the images.

The fact that ghost photography is not the definitive method that allows the capture of the spectral world, however, does not per se invalidate the existence of the soul or the Hereafter. The spiritual dimension, if it exists, resides in a sphere that, today, cannot be captured or tested by technology or by current evaluation, statistics and verification methods. We will see what the future holds for us.

SOURCES

- http://www.prairieghosts.com/ph_history.html

- https://archive.org/details/1923DoyleTheCaseForSpiritPhotography

- https://www.csicop.org/author/Kenny%20Biddle

- https://archive.org/details/photographicamus00woodiala/page/n7

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