The medium's message.

THE PERFECT MEDIUM: PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE OCCULT

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

SEPTEMBER 27-DECEMBER 31, 2005

Photography has always been considered a medium of fact, capable of producing precise and accurate images of the material world, or so begins the introduction to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's recent exhibition, "The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult." While we may question the validity of such a statement in an increasingly hyper-mediated, digitally manipulated world, one of the exhibition's curators, Pierre Apraxine, asks us to consider that perhaps this has been the case since photography's inception. A curious and quirky display of some one hundred and twenty photographs, "The Perfect Medium" traces the phenomenon of spirit photographs from the 1860s to World War II as documentary "proof" of the immaterial, and in the process, exposes the slippage that exists between seeing and believing.

As a unique genre, spirit photography developed against the backdrop of the Civil War, an era overcome by mourning. The desire for individuals to connect with their deceased loved ones fueled the credulous claims both of the Spiritualist movement and of the photographers who purportedly documented these spiritual reunions. Just as postmortem photographs produced an image of a body for remembrance, spirit photographs were intended to help mourners cope with their loss by projecting an image of the dead from beyond the grave. Of course, neither of these types of images was ever intended for a public exhibition space, calling into question both the photograph as well as the gallery space as means of emitting an aura of awe, but also authenticity. After studying the exhibition photographs, many of which are clearly the product of darkroom sleight of hand, the astute viewer might begin to wonder if the entire exhibition is intended as some sort of elaborate hoax, staged by the Met--not so much about the specific images on view but rather intended as a self-reflexive discussion about the nature of photography itself as a medium for documenting that which is real. However, that is when the artistic alchemy begins as it should in all noteworthy exhibitions--and explains much of the fascination surrounding the show, as we, the viewers, are lured into becoming eloquent witnesses to the power of the imagination and the perpetual allure of the unknown. (1)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

I find myself considering this exhibition, not as much through the images per se (many of which one would be hard-pressed to describe) but through questioning the photographers' impetus to make them and the viewers' desire to believe that the images were authentic, or at least in the potential that they could indeed be "true." Alison Ferris, curator of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, makes similar connections in her recent exhibition of contemporary work, "The Disembodied Spirit," which opened in 2003, suggesting that because of the "inherent slipperiness and indeterminacy of the image (of the ghost) to evoke visible and invisible, multiple and opposing sensibilities about race, gender, age, and sexuality, ghosts are entering the picture--particularly at the juncture of technology and representation--to trouble such benign fantasies." (2) One could argue that many of these similar tendencies were also in play at the turn of the century. That is, the mourning that was felt after the Civil War was not purely a melancholic loss of individuals but was also linked to the devastation of land and a way of life, as American society was in the fundamental throes of change due to the respective inventions of the telephone, telegraph, railroad, and electricity. Therein was born the age of anxiety, stress, and hysteria, and as such, many of the images represented in "The Perfect Medium" offer visual cure for all that ails.

As an exhibition, "The Perfect Medium" is divided into three distinct sections: photographs of spirits, photographs of mediums, and photographs of vital fluids. Although the first part historically grounds the significance of spirit photography by introducing the work of William Mumler, et al., it is also the area that feels the most like a simple parlor trick, eventually exposed as nothing more than smoke and mirrors. The images created by Edouard Buguet--a well-known spirit photographer until his deceit was exposed in a highly publicized trial--best exemplify this trickery. Included in the exhibition are images created before and after his convictions, both by the same fraudulent means. Thus, what was previously and legally deemed a hoax, now claims to be entertainingly real. Buguet went so far as to advertise his skills by stating that "the chosen ghost is guaranteed." (3) [emphasis mine]

In the section of the exhibition devoted to photographs of mediums, the viewer has the opportunity to study images created during seances. As such, we are introduced to "ectoplasm," defined as the visible substance believed to emanate from the body of a spiritualistic medium during communication with the dead. Rather than witness an ethereal apparition, we witness the ectoplasm itself seeping or leaking from the bodies of the (typically female) mediums. Unlike earlier photographs, in which the camera was the medium, now the reference has shifted to the physicality of the body of the medium itself. Due in part to rapid shutter technology and greater film sensitivity, the camera has become a tool to capture the medium, creating documents similar to Jean-Martin Charcot's contemporaneous images of the writhing female hysteric. However, the irony of these images is that ectoplasm, as a material, is fleeting and always in the process of disappearing even as it is being recorded. Peggy Phelan has written that "the disappearance of the object is fundamental to performance; it rehearses and repeats the disappearance of the subject who longs always to be remembered." (4) The medium and the photograph both remind us of the longing for the "what has been" as much as what continues to be. (5)

The final section of the exhibition also attends to the medium as a physical presence, but its photographs of vital forces redirect the conversation into the realm of the haptic. These "forces," including thoughts and dreams, were also believed to originate from the body of the medium and were captured by placing fingertips or foreheads onto sensitized plates--thus emitting color, pattern, and shadow. Although the subject matter is entirely different, I found myself recalling the actual plates of Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs, stained with chemistry, baring the physical marks of her fingerprints or a strand of hair. Like the medium, Cameron was often tainted as feminine or hysterical due to her own presumed lack of control over the photographic chemistry. However, both types of images refuse to deny the hand of the maker, embedding one into the other. Ultimately, "The Perfect Medium" calls into question whether these working photographers were interested in perfecting their darkroom sleight of hand or in exposing a visionary desire to imagine what can not be seen--at least, for now.

SARAH WEBB is an artist and independent curator residing in Rochester, New York. She is the co-editor of Singular Women: Writing the Artist (2003).

NOTES

1. Text adapted from exhibition wall text for "The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

2. Alison Ferris, The Disembodied Spirit (Brunswick: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2003), 42.

3. Clement Cheroux, et al., The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 58.

4. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 147.

5. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, Richard Howard, trans. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 93.