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Gee Whiz!  Archives sure are swell!

 

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From Beekeepers to Extras and Ectoplasm: My Research into Spirit Photography

Wisconsin Beekeepers Gallery and a “Discovery” 

Wisconsin Historical Images

Wisconsin Historical Images

  
This semester I am doing a practicum at the Wisconsin Historical Society. I am working in Wisconsin Historical Images, digitizing a collection of photographs of beekeepers in Wisconsin. I will eventually be creating a gallery of these images, similar to galleries already online. I have enjoyed learning more about photo archives, selecting photographs, and digitizing. I look forward to my time in the digital lab where I scan and catalog images, getting a glimpse into life as a beekeeper in WI from the 1880’s to today. I have come across many images that tell fantastic stories about beekeeping, not to mention some beautifully composed photographs.

Wisconsin Historical Images

One particular image stood out to me way back in the selection stage of my project. This photograph was in the Wisconsin Honey Producers Association collection. The image itself has very little to do with beekeeping - no bees or hives visible in the frame - but I knew I had to include it in the gallery. It depicts a man named Harry E. Hill, who was a photographer, beekeeper, and the editor of the American Bee Keeper from the late 19th to early 20th century. Harry Hill is seated at his desk, looking towards a ghostly figure to the left - a slightly transparent skeleton wrapped in an ethereal shroud.

This photograph prompted me to look into the photographic process of making apparitions appear. I had heard about this sort of thing in passing and I knew it had to do with a double exposure, but I had not held an actual photograph like this in my hands before. I started looking up more photos and seeing if there was more information on the subject. 

Turns out there is! I will share some of what I have been learning, but there is much more to cover than can be written in a blog post.

Spiritualism and Spirit Photography

http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com

Spiritualism is a religion that was most popular in English speaking countries from the 1840s-1920s. Cataclysmic events such as the American Civil War and World War I resulted in surges of the popularity of the movement, as so many lives were abruptly lost. Believers maintained that spirits of the dead lived on in the spirit world, and could communicate with the living in this world given the right circumstances. This usually involved mediums, mesmerists, seances, and eventually photographs. The medium of photography was developing during this same period. The two combined to make spirit photography, the attempt to capture the supernatural on film. Photographers mostly created images of living people sitting for a portrait with a spirit, called an "extra." Some famous spirit photographers include its inventor William Mumler (fraud discovered after he used recognizable, living Boston residents), William Crookes, and William Hope. Proponents of spiritualism such as Arthur Conan Doyle defended these photographers, even engaging in debates with skeptics.

I’d say I am more of a Scully than a Mulder. I enjoy examining these photographs with a skeptical eye and the knowledge that the photographers and mediums producing them had motives involving financial gain and publicity. Hearing stories about how people still believed that they were seeing their loved ones returned to this world, even when the medium was publicly exposed as a fraud, really made me understand the power of the spiritualist movement. Disproving these manipulative spirit photographs (as well as mediums and seances) fell into the hands of accomplished party-poopers such as the famous stage magician Harry Houdini and psychical researchers such as Harry Price. 

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com

Examining the history behind these images has made me very interested in the lengths spirit photographers and mediums would go to exploit believers. And the blind faith that spiritualists had that this new technology was revealing spirits. The belief in spiritualism and spirit photography did not completely end in the 1920s of course. Yet, imagining the process of photography as something involving magical seems so ridiculous now that the technology is common knowledge, and many of us carry cameras in our pockets.

However, I suggest the following exercise to relax the lines between fiction and fact:

Take a moment, turn your lights down low, and feel the chill of the last days of October. Flip through some historical spirit photographs. You can feel the ghostly traces of the once living, breathing people, trying to leave their mark on the world through a photograph. The images show the desire for connection to dead loved ones. To speak again, ask questions, and feel a comforting presence from the beyond.  

Remember this feeling when you look at any piece of the archival record - a letter, a bank book, a diary, a scrap of cloth. They are all pieces of history calling out to be noticed, studied, and shared. 

-Lotus Norton-Wisla

L. Norton-Wisla, L. Gildersleeve, S. Barsness, and an extra. Baraboo, WI. 2012. Photo by Dana Gerber.

Sources:

Image Heavy Websites and Blogs 
Environmental Graffiti: http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/news-15-amazing-examples-spirit-photography 
Library of Congress ya’ll: http://blogs.loc.gov/picturethis/2011/10/a-ghostly-image-spirit-photographs/ 
National Media Museum “G is for Ghosts”: http://nationalmediamuseumblog.wordpress.com/2013/05/20/photography-a-z-ghosts-spirit-photography/ 

More Reading about Spiritualism and Spirit Photography 
“History of Modern Spiritualism” http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/spiritualism/history/history.shtml 
“History of Spirit Photography” http://www.prairieghosts.com/ph_history.html 
“Beyond the Grave: A Brief History of Spirit Photography” http://www.amphilsoc.org/exhibits/spirits/index.htm 
Spiritualism and Spirit Photography” From the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University http://www.bu.edu/prc/spirit/spiritualism.htm 
Dead Media Archive, NYU Department of Media, Culture, and Communication http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php/Spirit_Photography 
Natale, Simone. "A Short History of Superimposition: From Spirit Photography to Early Cinema." Early Popular Visual Culture 10.2 (2012): 125-45. Print.
Jolly, Martyn. Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography. London: British Library, 2006. Print.
Chéroux, Clément. The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2005. Print.

Why We Do What We Do: A Story about Reference in the Archives

Sometimes our job as current or future archivists is not about the materials we handle, but about the people who are affected by the records we keep. On days when I am frustrated or overwhelmed, I remember an encounter I had with a patron about a year ago and realize there is a reason I love this career path. I wanted to share the story that follows- a real event that happened in the course of my job in the Local History & Genealogy department of a public library- because it is another reminder of why we do what we do. ~ Jill

She walks into the Local History & Genealogy Room as many of them do- timid, unsure. She is about my age, with long blond hair and a pretty smile. Her eyes are uncertain. She talks quickly, with a nervous energy that tells me her story long before her words do. She is here for a reason. They always are. The reference books, the obituaries, the newspapers all pause in anticipation, wondering if they have her story, if they will be what she needs.

Her mother was adopted as a baby, she explains to me breathlessly. They just learned the name of her real grandmother, who had lived in this town. She was born here, had grown up here, went to school here. They are trying to find her, they've just started their search, and would we have her old high school yearbook in our collection? She pauses, out of breath. She said what she needed to and now a bit of fear joins her anxiety. I smile, trying to convey some sort of reassurance in a single glance before answering in the affirmative and going to the yearbooks. I find the one she needs and show her to a table. The room waits, breathless. Thanking me, she pulls out her digital camera and opens the book. I leave her there, giving her privacy. Minutes tick by, quiet but expectant. Nothing but the turning of pages. Then a small sob bubbles into the hushed room, flooding every corner with its pain and relief, asking to be heard. I hear. I turn to see her standing, hunched over the page, her blond, wispy hair falling across the photograph of the grandmother she's never known. I go to her, and she looks up as she hears me approach. She holds the yearbook out to me, her eyes pleading, no longer unsure but still afraid. In a voice as innocent as a child's, she whispers. "This is the first time I've seen my grandmother." Hers are not the first tears shed here, as pieces come together and stories are rediscovered. She is not the first to cry in this room and she will not be the last. This I know. Without words, I put my arms around her and she circles her arms around my shoulders. We stand quietly there in the silence, in a moment of fragile strength, forging a bond that links the past to the present, the living to the dead.

The Internet Archive from a Media Studies Background

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Before coming to UW-Madison for my MLIS degree, I had limited exposure to actual archives. I was coming from the Media Studies field, and my previous institution, the University of Texas at Austin, had little in the way of my research interest, television history. Of course, UT-Austin has some incredible repositories; they just didn’t have what I needed. Lucky for me, there are an increasing number of television collections being digitized and made accessible online. The Prelinger Archives, hosted by the Internet Archive, has already been discussed here.But Internet Archive has other resources as well. They host Duke University’s AdViews collection, which has an incredible amount of television commercials from the 1950s through the 1980s. Here are a couple of my favorites that I came across in my research:

Internet Archive also has great collection of episodes from some classic television shows in the public domain. This episode from The Jack Benny Program proved useful in my thesis research:

These resources ended up being very helpful to me, and in some part, they influenced my decision to pursue a life in archives. It may not be as glamorous as working with the original physical materials, but their accessibility and openness was incredibly important to me and will continue to be so for future scholars.

-Carolina Hernandez

Do You Suffer from Archive Fever?

Do your eyes glaze over when you read Derrida? Do you have mysterious symptoms you can't account for? Follow this simple flowchart to find out whether you or someone you know has archive fever.*

*This flowchart has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

ARCHIVES: A Motivational Gallery

Mimi's Illustrated Guide to Graduate School, Archives, and Ryan Gosling

After enduring 4 grueling years in the wretched 9-5 slog, I got accepted to graduate school!  I am now a happy first year grad student in an archiving program!

Mainly, I think I was happy that I FINALLY had something to say to stop the never ending question that is directed to us lovely history majors in the world: “Oh, you were a history major! So does that mean you want to be a teacher?” 

I always wanted to say that I had bigger dreams of touching the past!  So that is how I ended up here.  Learning to do just that.  Unfortunately, I’m discovering that the “What do you do?” conversation, isn’t really much better… 

Not that it matters, because since I am a first year grad student, so all I really do is cry into my homework every night :(

  

I know that it is all going to be worth it though! Because I am learning that archivists are pretty kick ass!  I mean the archivist voice beats the pants off of the librarian voice any day!

And besides, I love going to work everyday now! I love knowing that I am helping to preserve the past.  These few scraps of paper and pictures are the last remnants of a life, and the fact that I get to help preserve it, is pretty amazing.  That is what we are all doing here!  I know that I am not queen of the archives yet…

But just give me time! It’s this connection to the past that gets an archivist’s heart racing and that fills all of us with excitement, and I love it!  We find lost things and bring them to light for future generations, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

And besides, we get the best version of Ryan Gosling!

-Mimi Loran