Customer Reviews

The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult

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THE PERFECT MEDIUM: Photography and the Occult is first a catalogue for an exhibition now titillating the public at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Hopefully this exhibition will travel: if this fine book/catalogue is any indication of the exciting realms the exhibition explores, it should be a popular success.

For those who regularly visit channelers, mediums, spiritualists, or who follow tales and histories of the world of the occult then this volume of history and photographs will not be as shocking as it is for those less willing to suspend logic. The photographs contained in this book trace auras, spirits, and phenomena dating form Victorian times to the 1930s. It would appear that the advent of the camera proved to confirm the dalliances of the mediums who summoned the spirits of the departed for the eager (and willing to pay!) clients. Photographs here show weird auras, shadows of beings, and phenomena not readily seen by the critical eye: are these the tomfoolery of the photographer manipulating photographic plates, staged bizarre frameworks that defy explanation outside the camera lens, or are these truly captured moments? That is for the viewer and the fine writers to dissect.

The latter portion of the book samples photographic portraits of various mediums, at times alone and at times with their assembled clients. One of particular interest is the medium Eugenie Picquart who was said to enter a trance and 'become' the voice and guise of Sarah Bernhardt and Mephistopheles! Spectacular theatrics that glow with both humor and invention - at the expense of the clients! The first spirit photographer, one William Mumler, concocted a photograph of Mary Todd Lincoln with the spirit of the deceased Abraham at her side. Such was the credibility of public in the PT Barnum age - and beyond.

It is a book that opens the discussion of what is photographic art - representation or manipulation of an image - and if it is both (as we routinely see in galleries today), it is a powerful addition to the history of art making. This is an entertaining, well-presented book of images only imagined by most. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, September 05

In the ancient days when cameras used film and the photographer had responsibility for advancing or changing the film in the camera before taking the next photo, there was a risk the pictures would be ruined by double exposure. A ghostly image of one figure would be superimposed upon another, to the detriment of the clear representation of both. It was a familiar accident, and few thought it had any particular meaning or importance. But in the nineteenth century, photography was just starting up when spiritualism was starting up, and to some the ghost images looked like, well, ghosts. In _The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult_ (Yale University Press), Clement Chéroux and other contributors have shown how photography documented spooks, auras, life forces, levitations, and more. This is a big book with hundreds of photographs. Looking through the pictures, it is fairly easy to see that not one demonstrates in an incontrovertible way that something supernatural was happening, but the photos are genuinely spooky and strange, and more than a bit silly.

The uncanny floating and transparent images shown in these tintypes, silver prints, and stereo cards are obvious concoctions. Many of the pictures are genuinely grotesque. There was a fashion in the early twentieth century for mediums to produce ectoplasm (you'd think that confronting the spirit world would put you above fashions or fads, but it isn't so). Ectoplasm could be extruded from a medium's mouth, nose, navel, or loins, a damp, cold, amorphous, gauzy stuff that was supposed to be a spirit manifesting in some sort of weird organic and material way. Photography was supposed to record objectively these phenomena and thus verify them, but the ectoplasmic substance that was supposed to be so otherworldly looked in the photos like cloth or paper. One of the less yucky photos in this series shows a standing man who looks as if he is in the process of vomiting a bolt of cloth, which has arrived onto the lap of delighted recipients. Among the prettier pictures in the book are those having to do with fluids. These were vital forces that were supposed to emanate from mediums as they put their fingertips or foreheads onto photographic plates. There was an effort to get scientific legitimacy for such photographs, and the "effluvists" aped the processes and jargon of radiology. They also designated the emanations as N-rays, V-rays, "... and enough others to form their own alphabet." Because of these scientific aspirations, genuine physicists evaluated the phenomenon, only finding such unextraordinary causes as poorly diluted developer or simple registry of body heat.

Though the book purports to be merely a historic documentation of a particular facet of photography without taking sides on veracity of the depicted phenomena, the essays that accompany the pictures cannot help but take the controversy into account. This is in part because the photographs were controversial in their time, and historic accounts of them cannot omit that there were lawsuits against frauds as well as apostate spiritualist photographers who afterwards made their living exposing tricks rather than performing them. The pictures are a documentation of the will to believe. For instance, even Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, a German doctor and photographic researcher of the medium Eva C., confessed of a photo of the medium with ectoplasm all over her head, "A skeptical spectator would think on seeing this photograph that Eva had put a kitchen towel on her head." Actually, it takes very little skepticism to see the picture in that way, but true believers have their own way of seeing things, wonderfully documented in a fine looking book.

Spirit photography holds an important place in the history of photography because it's really the first time that double exposures and mattes were used to manipulate images.

This book, which is the partner to a museum show of the same name, doesn't take a position as to whether any of the pictures are real or hoaxes. It leaves that up to you. The purpose, however, is to give the history of this fascinating area of photography, which it does very well. It is beautifully printed in Italy with a durable hard cover and filled with excellent examples. It also treats the subject in an academic style the I found informative.

If you're like me, you will find it a good addition to you're photography book collection or a fun coffee table attraction. It might even leave you scratching your head, especially in the case of Ted Serios.

I actually got this book for my sister as a birthday gift and she loved it. very interesting and great pics.

This book is the best chronicling of these early century occult meetings I have come across, it is a must have for anyone interested in the spirit of the humanity's need for telling ghost stories and really living their lives in a way to make people believe. I am not one who believes any of this is really genuine, but I feel they make for very interesting folk tales, awesome.

what was the predecessor of photoshop and who were its magicians and muses. this compendium sheds lite on a period in which as mysterious as photography was it was meant to capture "reality." The reality that it captured was one of ghosts and spirits, for the believers a true testament of what lay beyond. for those behind the camera it lay the groundwork for artist such as ryszard horowitz and others who just as theoretical physicists who bend the time/space continuum these artist where the first to blur the line of what is real and surreal.

I've been using this book along with Deborah Blum's Ghost Hunters in my classes at Waseda University, and one immediately notices the disparity between verbal descriptions of the evidence that convinced the Victorian savants that certain mediums and types of phenomena were "genuine" and the photographic evidence that helped to convince them as lavishly reproduced in this volume. Indeed, we must hold in abeyance our own sophisticated knowledge of special effects in this age of paint shop and Star Wars to keep from laughing out loud at the crude hoaxes that went far to convince such obviously intelligent people as the scientist William Crookes and the naturalist Alfred Wallace to accept the existence of the supernatural based on this kind of material. Then, of course, there are the clearer, more obviously "staged," self-defined hoaxes as well, created to educate and amuse the dupes and the skeptics, respectively, and some great examples are included in this section of the book. If these things, along with the assorted, regurgitated bolts of cloth or glowing strings of muslin drawn from the nasal cavity and draped over the forehead or plucked from the groin or anus of a medium and held fluttering at the end of a wire in the claustrophobic darkness of the seance room were actually considered "proof" then we must suspect that just about every account of things seen and experienced that have come down to us in "scientific" investigative narratives of the 19th and early 20th centuries to be tainted with this same sort of innocence. This would include such remarkable cases as D.D. Home and even Mrs. Piper and her cross-correspondences. Of course, I'm not suggesting that any of these well-meaning investigators willfully tried to misrepresent what they saw, but I suspect that genuine inexperience both with observing and keeping tabs on their subjects, as well as an undeveloped understanding of abnormal psychology, as well--dare I say it?--the will to believe,--skewed their observations. The creation of a self-consistent narrative covered these observational defects, and imposed a patina of believability on the phenomena described. The infamous Cottingly fairies are included as an index as to just how far the will to believe could push the gullibility of intelligent people, along with such near pornographic seance room shots as the extruding of a sheep's lung (think "spirit hand")from the navel--or perhaps lower--of the attractive Margery the medium, her delta of venus barely covered with a gentleman's handkerchief. Having said this, however, one series of photographs from the 1940's taken in England that includes a levitating table and a near chaotic snap of one of the circle apparently being roughly thrown or catpulted into the air over the heads of the others, gives one pause. The essays in this book are scholarly, well-documented, and good to great. Highly recommended even if a little pricey.

I am still trying to get through this book after several months. It has loads of information - some great, some mundane - but it is not a quick read. I just finished writing a book called Ghosts In The Cemetery and tried using this as a research book. It really was not very helpful for my purposes. I would have liked to see the exhibit that the book covers. It would not have been quite as dense.