PhotograPhy anD SPirit
By John Harvey
Reaktion, £15.95 (paperback)
Photographs and death: the association is now
so conventional, and the twinning of image and
spectre so seductive (as witness recent books on
photography and the occult by Marina Warner
Harvey treats authoritatively of notorious
and Clément Chéroux), that it’s easy to forget
spectre-mongers such as Ada Deane, who
that the main theoretical inspiration for this field
appeared swathed in ectoplasmic muslin and
of research – Roland Barthes’s comment on the
peddled images of British soldiers killed in the
‘flat death’ of the photograph in Camera Lucida
First World War: they emerge, in 1924, from a
(1980) – is not really about ghosts at all. Nor, it’s
cloud of cotton wool. The book is especially
worth recalling, is the spirit photograph – subject
good on the intricacies of spiritualist terminology:
of John Harvey’s economical and intriguing
the supposed distinctions, for example, between
new study – necessarily an artefact of memory
‘imaginal’, ‘intellectual’ and ‘corporeal’ visions.
or mourning. What it pictures, after all, is a kind
Harvey details the lengths gone to by some
of life: passed over, yes, but pressing back upon
enthusiasts, following the invention of half-
the present. The chief virtue of Photography and
tone printing, to assert that the curious dots
Spirit is the way Harvey restores the full sense of
on the faces of their ‘extras’ were a feature of
‘spirit’ in nineteenth-century science, religion and
supernatural physiognomy, not evidence of the
aesthetics, while charting spirit photography’s
pictures’ having been cut from newspapers. And
persistence well into the twentieth century.
though he is sometimes too even-handed about
What is missing from most accounts of the
the motives and methods of the photographers
flourishing of phantom portraits is much sense of
themselves, he does note tartly that by the end of
the Christian context for such hopeful emanations.
the nineteenth century ‘the genre began to look
Spiritualism was first of all a religious movement,
increasingly cack-handed’.
with sincerely held, if implausible, beliefs about
There are lapses, and Harvey is sometimes
the ability of the deceased to manifest among the
frustratingly imprecise about the details of images
living. The movement borrowed its iconography
and the techniques by which they were contrived,
from traditional Christian art, hence the profusion
so that one half suspects he is himself seeing
of halo-like lights and tongues of pale fire: forms
things that are simply not there. He describes
easily registered, accidentally or otherwise, on the
an Egyptian photograph from 1968, purporting
photographic plate. Photography, in other words,
to show the Virgin Mary atop a church, as
seems to have encouraged the idea of a ghost
depicting something ‘defocused, underexposed
as etheric, gaseous entity – previously, revenants
and amorphous’, when it is actually none of these
had been substantial beings, not at all wispy or
(though it is certainly unclear what it actually is).
transparent. A verbal rapport soon developed
He talks of a medium, in 1858, singing ‘in Swiss’,
too between technology and the theatre of
whatever that is. And his prose is subject to some
apparition: spiritualists spoke of the medium
alarming alliterative, rhyming and assonantal
as ‘sensitive’; spirit anomalies were ‘extras’, as if
excesses – ‘illusions, delusions and effusions…
rehearsing the arrival of cinematic spooks.
the spectrum is the spectre’ – that suggest he
By Eric C. Shiner & Reiko Tomii
is a touch too thrilled by his own topic. For the
Japan Society/Yale University Press, $65/£40 (hardcover)
most part, however, Photography and Spirit is a
fascinating addition to the literature on delusional
aesthetics. Brian Dillon
JAN_books.indd.indd 131 4/12/07 15:12:18
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