Spirit Photography: The Ghostbusters' Predecessors
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Tags: Flickr, Flickr Commons, photography history, ghosts, National Media Museum, Spirit Photography, William Hope
It is always amazing to see what interesting things you can discover in the history of photography. My latest discovery: Spirit Photography. This is a strange practice that wanted to make ghosts visible on film.
Technically, photographers used double exposures to superimpose the “ghosts” onto the photograph. The first spirit photographer is considered to be William H. Mumler, who went ghost hunting with a camera as early as the 1860s. If you want to know more, you can find an interesting introduction to the topic at prairieghost.com. Spirit photography has a two-fold status: on the one hand, the images are clearly manipulated, but on the other hand, they are supposed to prove the existence of ghosts and create a connection to the bereaved.
At Flickr Commons, there is an interesting collection of spirit photographs from the archives of National Media Museum in Bradford, West Yorkshire. They were taken by William Hope (1863-1933), a photographer who devoted himself to spirit photography from 1905 and founded his own circle of spirit photographers. A quote from the description provides a striking illustration of how spirit photographers worked:
A woman’s face appears in a ‘misty’ cloud to the right of the man - identified as that of his deceased first wife. Hope may have already held her photograph in his studio, or he may have asked the man to supply her photograph under the pretence of using the image to contact the spirit world.
William Hope is considered by some to be a true master of spiritual photography, but by others he is seen as a charlatan who wants to take money out of the pockets of his devout customers.