For photographic historians, occult imagery is a new field of investigation. Formerly the concern of collectors and niche publications, it did not feature in historical research until the 1990s. But novelty is only one of the difficulties associated with it. Occultism being, by definition, hidden, its archives are hard to access; and photographs that render it visible, still more so. This practical problem is compounded by an epistemological one. Occultism is a vast field embracing widely divergent beliefs (contrasting, for example, powers of the living versus manifestations of the dead) and approaches (commercial versus experimental), often embodied in the same visual forms. Since a purely photographic approach to occult iconography is inadequate, it is necessary to proceed via the history of occultism itself. From this perspective three categories of occult photographs emerge.
Spirit photography
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.
Effluviography
In the last decades of the 19th century, occultism was riven by conflict between supporters of spiritualism and those of animism. The former believed that the explanation for occult phenomena lay in the world beyond, while the latter attributed them to the power of mediums. This division favoured the development of effuviographical imaging: the cameraless capture, directly on a sensitized plate, of ‘fluids’ emanating from the medium: the soul, the vital force, but also thoughts and dreams. After preliminary work by Karl von Reichenbach (1788-1869) in 1861, this became prominent in the 1890s, benefiting from the respectability of research on radioactivity and X-rays. In France, Dr Hippolyte Baraduc (1850-1902) and Louis Darget attempted to photograph thoughts or psychic energy (‘the light of the soul’) simply by placing foreheads or fingers on a photographic plate. Despite refutations by experts, who argued that the results claimed by the ‘effluvists’ were merely technical accidents, these experiments continued throughout the 20th century. Semyon and Valentina Kirlian in the 1940s, Ted Serios and Armando Salas Portugal twenty years later, revisited the field. ‘Aura photography’, practised commercially by many operators today, is its latest manifestation. In moving from the experimental to the commercial it has taken an opposite course to that of spirit photography.
Supernatural photography
The third category of occult photography is the largest and most diverse. It goes back to the beginnings of photography itself and covers images of various phenomena: hypnosis, levitation, telekinesis, poltergeists, ectoplasms, etc. It also includes ‘fairy pictures’ (as at Cottingley), or images of legendary creatures (the Yeti, the Loch Ness monster), or UFOs. Fundamental to this type of photograph compared with the others is that it does not show ‘the invisible’, but more or less what an observer present during the exposure could have seen. Supernatural photography is not an investigative tool that sees what the eye cannot, but a mere documentary record.
— Clément Chéroux
Bibliography
- Baraduc, H., L'Âme humaine (1896).
- Conan Doyle, A., The Case for Spirit Photography (1922).
- Krauss, R. H., Beyond Light and Shadow (1995).
- Fischer, A., and Loers, V. (eds.), Im Reich der Phantome (1997).
- Le troisième oeil. La photographie et l'occulte (2004).
- Apraxine, A., and Schmit, S., et al., The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (2005)
