Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theatre, Trick Films, and Photography's Uncanny.

In one of his more famous essays on photography, Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations, Tom Gunning describes the medium as being fraught with a double existence as both an icon, or bearer of resemblance, as well as an index, which points to the photograph as a literal, empirical trace of past-time. Also essential to this view is the fact that photography is inherently a kind of scientific, chemical/mechanical machine free from the "unreliability of human discourse" (i.e., an image making medium far different than drawing or painting). But, the most striking aspect of photography's early development and mass consumption were the feelings of discomfort experienced by many when viewing this new technology, along with its association with the occult.

The Uncanny and the Double

To describe the startling, “uncanny” experience felt by 19th century viewers of photography, Gunning begins with a fascinating quote from Balzac's novel Cousin Pons, where the author states, in a narrative digression shot-through with notions gleaned from Spiritualist metaphysics, that the figure or thing represented in a photograph exists as a kind of specter or ghost that is constantly producing, shedding, or radiating images of itself outward towards the camera in order to be recorded. In essence, the sensitized photographic plate, via the camera's lens, captures moments of a kind of spiritual singularity emanating from the Real World, and Real Things, and freezes them all forever, in a kind of half-religious and proto-quantum mechanical matrix of psychology, observation, recording, and iconographic image making not far removed, for Gunning, from any number of Christian panel and canvas paintings executed over the previous millennium.

Next, Gunning steers the discussion towards another famous author of the 19th century, Sigmund Freud, who locates the feeling of the uncanny through a personal story in which he found himself walking in circles through a shady part of town filled with prostitutes, thus experiencing repetitively strange and uncomfortable feelings and perceptions while in orbit around this urban space.

Without getting into the peculiar erotic connotations (for Freud himself) implicit within this story, or the refined way Gunning links Freud’s own complex theory of the “Return of the Repressed” to his walkabout, it is enough to say that the uncanny, spooky, deja-vu feeling Freud describes was the impetus for his important concept of the “Double”: Doubling refers to the representation/projection of the ego outward that can assume various forms outside the physical self of the subject (twins, mirroring, reflections, self/portraiture, etc), and has no small connection to aspects of primitive animism as well as the mythological story of Narcissus, and, of course, to photography as a medium. 

What photography does, according to Gunning, is to provide a technology which could summon feelings of the uncanny through a visual-empirical doubling of reality, thus grounding Spiritualism in science/technology and helping to give it quasi-rational justification for proliferating its beliefs.

He also relates other pseudo-empirical methods of communication with the dead to his discussion, such as the example of the Fox sisters who became famous for their seances whereby they rapped out messages from the beyond (Morse Code-like, and in an empirical auditory way that could also be “directly” sensed)–Even famous public figures of the time, such as Thomas Watson of Alexander Graham Bell's laboratory, often fell into believing the efficacy of the sisters’ contacts with the otherworldly. Spiritualism now becomes, according to Gunning, intertwined with the development of early forms of mass communication and the scientific/technological in general.

Doubling of the Double Through the Photographic Mirror of American Spiritualism

A whole host of optical methods were used by spirit photographers to prove the existence of the Spirit Realm, the most successful of which was the sandwiching of different negatives in order to reveal the sought-for ghostly figures in a final photographic object–From President Lincoln's towering ghost standing behind his seated widow (complete with his hands upon her shoulders), to multiple exposures of dead children's faces next to their mothers, to strangely arranged circular galleries of ghostly heads, all were examples of the different arrangements spirit photographers executed in order to display the other-worldly beings and loved ones from the beyond. 

Often appearing within these photographs were, incredibly for their early viewers, images people had seen elsewhere–Recognizable public images lurking both out in the Real World, and within in the dark recesses of the secret archives each spirit photographer possessed, were somehow (re)appearing. In order to rationalize these doubly-doubled images’ inclusion, a spirit photographer would argue that, in order for people to recognize the spirits, they themselves must use common, understandable imagery for communicative reasons. So, in short, the spirits were also producing photographs, which is a profoundly revelatory thesis that had deep metaphysical implications for both the realms of the living and the dead.

Photography also engaged in a fascinating alliance with another aspect of Spiritualism in which entranced mediums would throw up, evacuate, or generally excrete "materializations" of some uncertain gelatinous substance (in this case, not of a silver halide nature) that often included yet more images of the dead. Also, Spiritualists claimed that by merely holding a piece of photographic material, without the aid of a camera, one could produce images of ghosts, or, even more incredibly, a ghost in its entirety could be materialized via (any) photographic methods and then be touched, and even smelled.

One of Gunning’s most impressive examples during this discussion uses the instance of the ghost of one Katie King, whose supposed conjuring famously fooled one of the finest British scientists of the era, William Cookes, and would end up giving more than a little credence to the beliefs of the Spiritualists through his association–Though it was later shown that the medium who conjured Ms. King looked identical to the ghost she was purportedly summoning, thus conjuring a spirit that was, in essence as well as literally, a living double of a dead double (perhaps the most truly astonishing instance where photographic material begat the very thing it represented).

All of these meta/physical mechanizations involving photographic technology take us in one direction or another from the material, to the immaterial, and back to the material again, providing the structure for an infinite empirical/spiritual feedback loop. What could be more uncanny, or more to the point, what could provide more exemplary evidence for the existence of the Spirit Realm, then a new technology being able to not only open the doors of perception, but to actively enable communication with the Other Side? 

Indeed, in Spirit Photography the mediating technology itself takes over the human medium's role, and the most profound connection between photography and Spiritualist manifestation lies in the concept of the sensitive medium (literally and figuratively, as both the sensitive medium that conjures up the ghosts, as well as the sensitive plate that captures them)–This double figuration of a sensitive, doubling medium is the ultimate medium-as-message.

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What Gunning does throughout his essay is weave a very subtle, very detailed socio-historical analysis which provides an exceptional lens through which to observe one of the final sociocultural waves in the 19th century that shifted the larger focus from the religiously-subjective, to the near complete domination of the empirical/visual in our own present culture, and his analysis convincingly fuses together issues relating to period gender bias, economics, legal issues concerning fraud and quackery, the spectacles of magic shows, and showmanship itself. †

In the end, Gunning returns to the idea that Balzac found so compelling in which photography didn't simply capture the trace of something, but that this something was involved in a nearly endless series of self-referential image production. Therefore, what we end up having during this time in Western history is a situation in which the feeling of the uncanny, the idea of the Double, the fear of death, along with a new technology, engenders a metaphysics that would have the spirits on the other side creating infinitely reproducible photographs of themselves in order to communicate with the living. 

We have, in short, a model of the universe where things reproduce themselves through a never ending re-production of images, but have no real, “original” existence outside of these images. Sounds uncannily familiar, doesn't it?

Notes:

In Buster Keaton’s film, The Electric House, the director effectively uses a lot of filming techniques that are fairly mature for his contemporary. The film itself functions as a comment on the demands of the people in his time for new gadgetry and the subsequent elevation in status. This demand is as prevalent as ever, thus giving cross generational validity.

This comedy, as with any good comedy, is used as a method of critique. Laziness of the American people and their need for products to allow them to sloth in peace, gadgets made for the house such as the escalator, the train food server and the dishwasher.  The replacement of various tasks once held by the help also conveys the fear of many Americans at the time; that the industrialization would eventually render manual labor obsolete.

This comedy in the film represents a real life horror for the American people possibly contributing to the eeriness of the film.  As eeriness comes from what we fear subconsciously being laid out in front of us.  

Or these gadgets are cumulatively just a good excuse to have a train do some tricks for us as with the “Cinema of Attractions” idea posed by Tom Gunning.

The fact that these various inventions are so easily made into a dangerous world of terror expresses a fear that with the over simplification of activities comes a dichotomous over complication in which the owners of this fantastic home are worse off than their assumedly less advanced neighbors.  Yet another luddite mentality being conveyed through this spoof-like macabre film.

In regards to editing, I particularly liked the use of match on action shots specifically regarding the escalator malfunctions.  Whomever the unlucky soul may be that finds them selves on the escalator during its malfunction is shown flying out of the window from the interior, then immediately coming out from an outside perspective.  This technique doesn’t feel noticeable as it is prolific in cinema today, but at the time was quite cutting edge.