The Return of the Dead Imagined?
Seema Srivastava
Roland Barthes described photography’s spectacular possession as "that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead." Barthes’ words are certainly brought to life in the wonderfully strange exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult." An intimate display of around 120 European and American photographs from 1860-1940, the exhibition reveals the human need for belief in an afterlife, and in the existence of an immaterial world following the harsh realities of death and despair in the wake of social calamities such as the Civil War and World War I. The exhibition affirms that photography played a key role in the construction of a spiritualism that pervaded much of Western culture during these difficult periods. Like those who seek tangible proof of god through shooting stars and human birth, 19th Century photographers such as Édouard Isidore Buguet, shown in one photograph fixedly levitating a chair, sought to document spirits through the miraculous medium of photography–then a relatively new technology.
Filled with apparitions, fairies and ectoplasm, neither the exhibition nor its excellent catalogue examines the validity of spiritual existence represented in the photographs, but offers instead a forceful meta-text, like some closet specter that hovers below the surface of the exhibition’s appearance. Though "Perfect Medium" reveals that Buguet was tried for fraud in 1875 and that he even admitted to the use of artificial photographic manipulations such as double exposures, it is evident that this show cleverly probes the significance of illusion. While its ostensible focus is on the visual representation of ghosts and spirits, the exhibition ultimately exposes the artificiality of the photographic medium and its brilliant capacity to produce the irreducible illusion. Yet simultaneously, this compelling unveiling is crafted so effectively that the spectator who stands before Eugène Thiébault’s Henri Robin and a Specter–a magical image that portrays beautifully, the struggle between the real and intangible–is overcome with the desperate desire to believe. Indeed, this is what life is about–desire, belief and death–and these truths are central to the composition of this haunting curatorial construction. Even the shrewd creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, believed in the existence of fairies, and his name is frequently invoked throughout the exhibition as one of the staunchest supporters of the photographic documentation of paranormal presence.
Reminiscent of reportage in grisaille, black and white photographs of ghosts and spirits float throughout the exhibition, but the show also includes images of double-headed mediums, their booths and frequently, their naked bodies. In one photograph of the medium Eva C. taken in 1912 by the German photographer Albert Von Schrenck-Notzing, there mysteriously appears an object shaped like the medium’s slipper atop her head–a kind of premonition of Surrealist Salvador Dali’s Schiaparelli shoe-hat which was to materialize a couple of decades later. Most disturbing however, are the photographic renditions of ectoplasm. Who knew it existed a century before Bill Murray in Ghostbusters? In these photographs, the slimy material emanates from between the legs of the always-female medium. It is as though spirit photographers understood not only the power of their perfect medium, but also the miracle of its birth–an immaculate conception, the perfect illusion, uniting both the living and the dead.
