by Douglas Messerli
Clément Chéroux, Andreas Fischer, Pierre Appaxine, Denis
Ganguilhem, and Sophie Schmit The
Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2005
In November 2005 I saw “The Perfect Medium: Photography and
the Occult” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It was a fascinating
show, and one that deserved the hour or so I spent staring at the photographs
of supposed spirits, fluids, mediums, and supernatural matter.
Most of these images were obviously manipulated,
beginning with the earliest works shown by the American William H. Mummler and
the British photographers Frederick Hudson and John Beattie. Many of these
represent subjects in reverie or half-asleep or at the medium’s table with
vague figures standing beside them or—occasionally, and almost comically, on
their laps, as in the Frederick Hudson photo, “Alfred Russel Wallace with the
Spirit of His Mother.”
Some of these works were simple hoaxes, but others billed themselves as “phantasmagorical” entertainments, and indeed the works of Andre-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri and Eugène Thiébult are quite frighteningly gory: the first photographer is represented with a set of photographs depicting two friends posing before the camera before one friend reappears (in a sequential image) naked with a helmet on his head, while the second photographer’s “Henri Robin and a Specter” of 1863 presents an image of a sheeted skeleton attempting to embrace a besuited gentleman in his study.
It took only a
few years from these original images before the specters became less
theatrical, allowing far more imaginative associations: the German photographer
Theodor Prinz’s “A Ghost,” for example, shows three men at table with a white
figure with no discernible features hovering above them. The American W.
Fitz-Hugh Smith placed two blank “Seeds” plates upon a table in a semi-lighted
room while two persons rested their hands upon them on five successive Friday
nights. The results are two negatives representing a total of forty-two faces,
Christ in the center of the first and Shakespeare at center of the second.
Frances Griffiths Elsie Wright of the United
Kingdom depicted her young girls with miniature fairies and spites. Madge
Donohoe, another Britisher, practiced what she called “skotography,”
photographs of spirits taken without a camera or light. Pressing a packaged
photographic plate against her face at night, she “entered into communication”
with “unseen operators”—most often her late husband or the detective writer Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle (a great admirer of her work and that of other spiritualist
photographers). Her prints represent rays of light surrounding circular images
of individuals, masks of eyes, and other figures that appear to have natural
forms.
The second part of
the show was dedicated to manifestations of ectoplasm and fluids forming images
and words, or sometimes simply swirling out the air of the mouths, noses, and
other orifices of mediums and other seated figures. Perhaps the most disgusting
of these are the photographs by the American R. W. Conant who pictured the
medium Margery emitting masses of ectoplasm from her nose. Some mediums even
produced ectoplasm in the likenesses of figures such as Arthur Conan Doyle,
represented in a photograph by the Canadian Tomas Glendenning Hamilton.
Some
photographers, such as Paul Le Cour lay claim to witnessing levitating tables
and chairs. In the Dane Sven Türck’s photographs of the 1940s, not only do
chairs and tables go flying through space, but in at least one instance, the
medium himself. The American Sorrat Group of the 1960s colored snapshots of
metal coffee tables and dolls rising above the ground, suggesting a comically
gravity-free world of American domesticity.
Several of these
photographers insisted upon witnesses to their activities and put heavy
constraints upon their photographic processes to prove the “truthfulness” of
their work. Today, of course, even the newspapers proclaim how easy it is—given
the advent of the computer—to manipulate photographic images. But what we
recognize in this show is that photography was always a medium that attracted
manipulation of both image and audience—an important statement, I suggest,
given the continued faith Americans (and, I am certain, citizens of other
countries) put in photographic representation. It was almost inevitable that
the two major works that attracted the ire of conservative politicians and
religious leaders of the 1980s and 1990s were photographic images: the “Piss
Christ” photographs of Andres Serrano and the nude images of black males by
Robert Mapplethorpe—both of whom lost venues for their art and financial
support. Had their works been paintings would they have caused the furor they
evoked? Why should we so intertwine the photograph with a kind of realist
presentation of life that it actually offends certain viewers? Of course,
painting and sculpture can evoke the same reactions, but we understand,
somehow, that they are “creations,” evocations of experience and manipulations of
reality, while we somehow “believe” in the photographic image. This show should
certainly make us question that faith.
Perhaps this
issue lies behind the images I find the most fascinating in this show: the
“Thoughtography” of Ted Serios. In his mid-thirties, working as an elevator
operator, Serios discovered that he could use his mind to project images onto
film in an ordinary box camera. Drawing the attention of psychiatrist and
psychical researcher Jule Eisenbud, Serios, overseen by researcher, underwent
thousands of trials, witnessed by hundreds of different observers. The series
is rather startling. There were more than four hundred images that contain
specific images, some of these based on “target” figures concealed from Serios
in various manners such as sealing the image in an opaque envelope. Although
the correspondences to the “psychic” photographs were often not very close, it
was sometimes the very differences which made these interesting. For example,
in attempting to produce a picture of the Chicago Hilton Hotel, where he had
once worked, Serios, with Eisenbud holding and triggering the camera some three
feet away, produced instead the Hilton Hotel in Denver, but at an angle and
perspective that would have been impossible for a photographer to
accomplish—from a “position not achievable with an ordinary seven-foot
stepladder but only with some special contrivance for getting the cameraman
well into the air.” In another so-called “distortion,” Serios produced a
photograph of Eisenbud’s ranch outside of Denver without ever having visited
it; even more strangely, however, was the fact that the ranch produced in
Serios’ thought-image did not represent the psychiatrist’s ranch at the time of
the event, but as it had been years earlier, without shutters on the windows
and beside a barn in a condition in which it had never existed.
An alcoholic,
Serios was not an easy subject, and one day he simply determined to stop the
experiments. He seldom was able to mentally produce an image again.
Many of us would
like to believe in psychic phenomena: it would explain so many of our
fantasies, our desires and dreams. But, in the end it is the imperfection of
these images—the fascinating manipulation of reality that precludes belief—that
makes them of interest to us as art.
Los Angeles, December 7, 2005
Reprinted
from Reading
with My Lips (August
2024).
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