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.