The Photographic Medium: reinventing the ghost in the visual culture of psychic photography

by John Harvey

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The Photographic Medium: reinventing the ghost in the visual culture of psychic photography 25:44

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The paper proposes that a complex relationship exists between (especially) counterfeit ghost photographs produced in the USA and UK after 1860 and earlier pictorial images of apparitions. This relationship is expressed severally, in: first, an association between ghost photographs and the conventions of religious pictures and visions (enabling the former to connote a spiritual aura); secondly, a transformation in the representation of ghosts (predicated on the nature of the photographic medium and process), which contrasts significantly with previous pictorial codes of visualization; thirdly, a stylistic evolution in the representation of apparitions in the history of photography from figuration to abstraction (co-terminus with the development of visual form in Modernist art); and, fourthly, the puzzling and almost ubiquitous presence in ghost photographs of portraits of the dead that are, apparently, reproduced from existing prints and paintings. The implications of this relationship for testing the authenticity of ghost photographs is also discussed.

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released May 5, 2021

Personnel: John Harvey.

Context: Paper presented at the Twenty-Seventh International Conference of the Society for Psychical Research, Manchester, UK (September 5–7, 2003).

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John Harvey Aberystwyth, UK

I’m a practitioner and historian of sound art and visual art, and Emeritus Professor of Art at the School of Art, Aberystwyth University, UK. My research field is the sonic and visual culture of religion. I explore the sonic articulations of the Christian religion by engaging visual, textual, and audible sources, theological and cultural ideas, and systemic and audiovisualogical processes. ... more

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