The Victorian photographers who captured the spirits of the age

From the October 2025 subject of Apollo. Preview and subscribe right here.

It began off, appropriately sufficient, with an unexplained phenomenon. In 1862, the Boston jewelry engraver and beginner photographer William H. Mumler took a number of self-portraits, and upon growing them found in a single a diaphanous trace of a second determine – although he had been completely alone in his studio. His first intuition was that he had not completely cleaned the glass photographic plate earlier than reusing it. Entirely believable, and virtually actually the case; however Mumler then consulted a number one advocate of the favored Spiritualist motion, who assured him that he had succeeded in photographing some type of spectral emanation. 

Thus ‘spirit photography’ was born – not fairly the fabric of autumnal fireplace ghost tales, however pleasingly uncanny and unsettling in its personal approach. Mumler and his quite a few imitators quickly set themselves up in enterprise as photographic conduits to the deceased. The pictures, as a rule, had been the sort of staid portraits related to early pictures, but additionally miraculously within the body had been ghostly apparitions of deceased relations – typically resting their palms on the sitters’ shoulders, typically barely greater than a spooky smear. Almost, one may suppose, like a double publicity was concerned. Indeed, it’s doubtless that there have been some images created on this approach, however for the reason that sitter would must be current for each exposures (to make sure that they didn’t turn into see-through too), it may need seemed a bit apparent what was happening when an assistant draped in a winding sheet got here on set for the second shot. More typically, spirit photographers would have created the impact by overlaying a second glass plate whereas growing the image (having fastidiously quizzed the sitter upfront and chosen a spectral determine with the required options). 

Mumler charged $10 for a session – some 40 instances the going charge for an abnormal portrait – however even then couldn’t assure that the spirits could be ‘in attendance’. As a consequence, his shoppers tended in the direction of the wealthier strata of society, most famously Mary Todd Lincoln, widow of the assassinated president, whom he photographed apparently receiving a shoulder therapeutic massage from a translucent Honest Abe.

Therein, maybe, lies the important thing to spirit pictures’s mysterious reputation. Spiritualism was at its peak within the 1860s, however hung round like a stressed wraith till properly into the Nineteen Twenties. It is simple to grasp why it may need offered some sort of solace within the period of the American Civil War, when some 700,000 individuals had been killed far-off from their family members. (There is a minimum of one occasion of a lady being photographed with the ‘spirit’ of her deceased brother, just for him to come back marching residence once more, completely alive, shortly afterwards.) In Britain, too, it was arduous to flee reminders of those that had handed on. Mourning garments had been particularly distinguished, trendy even, within the wake of Prince Albert’s demise in 1861 – Queen Victoria wore hers for the following 40 years, significantly longer than regular etiquette dictated. Amid such fixed memento mori, the thought of constructing contact with the opposite facet would have appeared reassuring, whether or not by way of tapping tables at a séance or a photographic shoot with an ethereal presence – and the Spiritualist motion gave it the superficial sheen of a rational system of beliefs.

It is all too simple – lazy, even – to dismiss the Victorians as credulous ninnies, unable to detect what to the eyes of Twenty first-century sophisticates are blatant examples of digital camera trickery. But to take action is to color the nineteenth century, an period of relentless scientific and technological advance, as backward and primitive. Certainly, many had been taken in by spirit images, not least as a result of they needed to consider; however pictures was a relatively new, ahem, medium, so few individuals had been but conscious of what it was potential to attain in a darkroom. Many of the keystones of scientific advance, too, had been invisible to the bare eye, from electrical present to Pasteur’s germ concept, so the notion that cameras could be able to recording such issues was not with out plausibility. Indeed, it was given further impetus with Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays in 1895; the following images – of the bones in his spouse’s palms, as an example – should, at first, have appeared much more outlandish than any double publicity of a lady sporting a sheet might hope to be.

Not everyone on the time was taken in by this chicanery. Plenty had been properly conscious that spirit photographers had been nearer to confidence tricksters than exponents of the scientific arts. In 1869 Mumler stood trial in New York for fraud and larceny, with the nice showman P.T. Barnum – no stranger himself to tearing off a straightforward mark – testifying towards him. As proof, Barnum engaged an expert (non-spirit) photographer to create a portrait of him with the eerie visage of Lincoln faintly discernible behind him, like a wallpaper Shroud of Turin. Experts for the prosecution cited 9 separate strategies that may have been used to faux footage of the deceased. In the top, nonetheless, Mumler was acquitted, seemingly on the grounds that it was unimaginable to show past cheap doubt that he had used trickery versus genuinely capturing phantasms on digital camera.

Leaving apart the circumstances of their creation, at present spirit images have one thing of the attraction of outsider artwork. It is difficult to consider they had been ever taken significantly, however however there’s something compelling about inflexible, dour Victorians juxtaposed with floating heads that resemble Robert Freeman’s sleeve artwork for With the Beatles, or nebulous shapes that veer on abstraction. A choice of footage by Mumler and his contemporaries may be seen as a part of the exhibition ‘Ghosts: Visualizing the Supernatural’ presently operating on the Kunstmuseum Basel. Here you possibly can see haunting apparitions galore, ectoplasm, ‘the development stage of a spirit form’ and quite a lot of pictures that now appear extra comical than at first meant. An instance by the British studio of F.M. Parkes includes a hirsute sitter haunted, like Belshazzar, by a spooky graffito: the unpunctuated phrase ‘oh dont’ in a Tippex-like cursive above his head. Spirits had been virtually actually concerned in its creation – however more than likely of the chemical variety, on the improvement stage.

‘Ghosts: Visualizing the Supernatural’ is on the Kunstmuseum Basel till 8 March 2026.

From the October 2025 subject of Apollo. Preview and subscribe right here.