Rolls of Spiritualism in The Perfect Medium

Marcella Veneziale Arts Editor

Observers stood four and five deep at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a recent Sunday to get a glimpse at The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult. While the title itself is intriguing, the show documents the rise of beliefs in Spiritualism from the mid 1800s to the early 1900s.

The exhibit is divided into three main segments: Spirits, Emanations, and Fluids. Spirits ushers viewers into the realm of Spiritualism, which had its heyday in roughly the 1880s to the 1900s. Most of the photographs are either albumen or gelatin silver prints, but the first piece is an anonymous tintype in which a white hooded ghost seems to hover over real human figures. The plaque explains that a ghostly effect is created when a person costumed as a spirit steps out of the picture frame as the photograph is taken.

Several of the works display small photographs with eerie translucent specters hovering around their human counterparts. Édouard Isidore Buguet’s Nine Spirit Photographs, albumen silver prints taken between 1873 and 1875, shows human figures unaware of the presences lurking directly next to them. Buguet strongly criticized the Spiritualism movement; indeed, an entire countermovement developed in harsh response to Spiritualist beliefs. A second set by Buguet entitled Four Anti Spirit Photographs dates from 1875 and satirizes and mocks Spiritualism. The four small photos feature the same man levitating a chair and table, or with an omnipresent ghost hovering about.

Eugène Thiébault’s skepticism and humorous criticism of Spiritualism manifests itself in the 1863 albumen silver print Henri Robin and a Specter. The theatrical scene shows Robin in an exaggerated posture, assaulted by a ghostly figure with a skull peering from underneath its ubiquitous white hood. According to the museum plaque, Thiébault intends to “reveal the absurdity” of those who held such beliefs, and offers that the supernatural effects are merely the handiwork of a simple double exposure process.

Not every strange event can be dismissed with technical language, and Albert von Screnck-Notzing’s 1912 gelatin silver print The Medium Eva C. with a Luminous Apparition…proves this. The photograph captures the famous medium, Eva C., during a séance staring at a lightning-like flash that has appeared between her hands. The plaque notes that the object on her head is one of her slippers, which witnesses say appeared above her during the séance while inexplicably remaining on both of her feet as well. Séances were closely followed by influential scientists during the late 1800s, including the Curies, but their credibility diminished in the 1920s and 1930s due to scientific discoveries in psychology.

The second room of the exhibition is devoted to Fluids, also known as Emanations, which deal mostly with séances and levitations. A later album of Henri Mathouillot from 1935 displays a vast collection of gelatin silver prints of levitations and séances. Mathouillot was an electrical engineer who studied at the Société d’Études Psychiques, and whose interests in his career helped build his photography collection. Other phenomena are documented by Charles Williams, whose 1878 Passage of Matter through Matter shows two solid interlocked rings, which begs the viewer to question the possibility of such an event.

In the late 1800s, science began to play a larger role in the photographs, and early experiments in different ways of photographing the human body gained prevalence. Adrien Guébhard brings color to the exhibit with his cyanotypes which compare living and artificial fingers. Photographs from Hermann Schnauss and electrographs by Jacob von Narkiewicz-Jodko show human hands, and resemble early precursors of the modern day X-ray. This fascination continues with Louis Darget, who completed a series of photographs from 1898 to 1899 in which the subject’s fingers were placed directly on the negative plate and the resulting image developed.

The show provides documentation of a movement that during its time was popular and controversial, but balances this mysticism with more concrete scientific tendencies.