Ghost in the Machine: Photographs of Specters in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The practice of ‘Spirit Photography’ begins in Boston in 1861. It consists of photographs where —through the aid of a medium— the sitter could see a plate with his or her portrait near to the shadowy image of a dead beloved. The portrait of Mrs. Lincoln with her husband, taken after the president was killed, is a remarkable example of this practice. Despite its fraudulent character, the ‘Spirit Photography’ makes evident some of the most important issues in Photography such as the new temporality introduced by the technique —the ghost are only in the ‘now’ of the image, they can not be perceived even during the take. The photographic ghosts do terrify neither the sitters nor the viewer¬ but they are—as every image— uncanny because they allow us to ask what is the difference between a living person and a dead one. Or in a more extreme way: what does it mean to have (or to be) a body? This essay pays special attention to a photograph taken in London, on the “Remembrance Day” of 1920, in which it is possible to distinguish the faces of those who had fallen during the war. The take was suggested by a journalist who died in the Titanic tragedy and who, as a ‘ghost’, communicated with his daughter. The daughter claims that the aim of the image is —quoting her father—to prove that “Life after Death is a fact”. The picture takes up once again the promise of immortality offered by Photography in its beginnings but it also works as a critical view to the technological catastrophes of the new century.