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Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography by Martyn Jolly

Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography, a new British Library publication by Martyn Jolly, examines the phenomenon of spirit photography that developed in the 1870s and is the first book of its kind to bring together the extensive collection of spirit photographs from the British Library's Barlow Collection. Illustrated by works of the leading spirit photographers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Ada Deane, William Hope, Frederick Hudson and Edward Wyllie it also includes spirit photographs of one of spirit photography's most high-profile advocates, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, world-famous creator of Sherlock Holmes.

The craze for photographing ‘spirits' was rooted in the popularity of Spiritualism and psychic research that developed during the period from the 1860s to the 1930s. The appearance of ghostly figures, spirit writing and ectoplasm in these portraits was considered by many as nothing short of miraculous. In 1874 the eminent chemist and physicist William Crookes used the galvanic light of electric lamps to photograph the beautiful figure of the spirit Katie King, which had supposedly been materialized by the young Hackney medium Florence Cook.

Spirit Photographs

On Armistice Day in 1922 the Spirit Photographer Ada Deane stood above the crowd at the London Cenotaph and exposed her photographic plate for the entire duration of the Two Minutes Silence. On development, a river of disembodied faces had been recorded floating above the crowd. These were said to be the faces of fallen soldier returning from the 'Other Side'.

Later, in 1925 a researcher from the Society for Psychical Research travelled to Boston to investigate an ectoplasmic medium called Margery. Setting up a camera and flash apparatus he captured what appeared to be an ectoplasmic hand, supposedly a partially formed spirit entity, being expelled from between Margery's legs.

Although subsequently proved to be fakes, the ghostly figures, spirit writing and ectoplasm that appeared in these photographs were regarded by the contemporary viewer as miraculous, poignant messages, and an important means of contact with lost loved ones as post-First-World-War grief swept Europe. Spirit photographers became celebrities, sought after by grieving individuals, and reviled by others as shameless frauds, preying on vulnerable people for their own gain.

Spiritualism

As the Spiritualist movement gained momentum in the late nineteenth century, spirit photography attracted a range of high profile advocates as well as scientific researchers and proved to be a powerful, contentious and sensational phenomenon of its time. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - himself a spiritualist in later life - was a powerful supporter of the spiritualist movement, going so far as to pen the novel The Land of Mists on the subject. Famed escapologist Harry Houdini meanwhile - with whom he maintained a close friendship, upheld a scepticism that Conan Doyle believed prevented spiritual activity occurring in his presence.

Martyn Jolly who wrote Faces of the Living Dead said: “In the end, spirit photography turned out to not be a scientific truth, or a religious miracle. But, for its historical time, it remains an extraordinary act of collective imagination. Together, gullible clients, cunning mediums, opportunistic mentors and hubristic investigators created a rich imaginative economy where ideas, images and interpretations circulated, cross infected and interpenetrated each other.”

Author Martyn Jolly is an artist and a writer. The Head of Photomedia at the Australian National University School of Art and has been researching Spiritualist photography for several years as part of a larger project on the idea of the fake in photography. In 2001 he was curator of an exhibition of spirit photographs in Australia.

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Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography by Martyn Jolly, is published in hardback by the British Library, priced £20.00 with 160 pages and 100 black and white illustrations. The book is available from the British Library Shop (tel: +44 (0)20 7412 7735, fax: +44 (0)20 7412 7624, email: bl-bookshop@bl.uk.

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