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SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHY

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Ghostwatcher
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« on: January 19, 2008, 10:03:59 pm »

In 1874, a French photographer named E. Buguet opened up a studio and also began a career capturing the spirits on film. Most of his photographs were of famous people, most of whom claimed to recognize deceased loved ones and family members as extras. This did not stop him from being arrested for fraud and tried by the French government though. He admitted deception but even then, there were many who refused to accept his confession as genuine, claiming that he had been paid off by the church to plead guilty. In his confession, he stated that his photographs were created by double exposure. First, he would dress up his assistants to play the part of a ghost, or  would dress up a doll in sheet. This figure, along with a stock of heads, was seized by the police when they raided his studio. Buguet was fined and sentenced to a year in prison.

Even after this, his supporters continued to exist his photographs were real. Reverend Stainton Moses, the famous medium, was convinced that at least some of Buguet's spirit photographs were authentic. He said that the prosecution of the case was tainted by religious officials, that the judge was biased or that Buguet must have been bribed or terrorized to confess.

The 1870’s saw the first general acceptance that there might be something credible to at least some aspects of spirit photography. A number of references to it appeared in issues of the British Journal of Photography and in other periodicals of the time. In the 1890’s, J. Traille Taylor, the editor of the Journal, reviewed the history of spirit photography and detailed the methods by which fraudulent photos were sometimes produced. He approached the phenomenon as a true skeptic, not immediately disbelieving it, but studying it in a scientific manner. He used a stereoscopic camera and noted that the psychically produced images did not appear to be in three dimensions. He used his own camera and he and his assistants did all of the developing and photographing. Strangely, they were still able to produce mysterious results.

In 1891, the practice of spirit photography gained more credibility when Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-developer of the theory of evolution, spoke out with the belief that spirit photography should be studied scientifically. He later wrote about his own investigations into it and included a statement that he believed the possibility of it was real. He did not feel that just because some of the photos that had been documented were obviously fraudulent, that all of them could be dismissed as hoaxes.

Despite such notable interest in the field, little was heard of spirit photography (outside of Spiritualist circles) for a number of years. But during this time, some fairly spectacular photos did manage to appear and some of them have remained unexplained ever since.  Perhaps my favorite of this period has been referred to as the "Lord Combermere Photograph". The photo was taken in 1891 (and first published in 1895) by Sybell Corbett, who was staying with her sister at Combermere Abbey in Cheshire, England. She decided to take a photo of the large library there and used an exposure of about one hour, a fact that she noted in her diary. Although no one was in the room when the photo was taken, the developed plate showed the faint image of a man seated in one of the chairs. The photograph was shown to a relative of Lord Combermere and it was identified as being the man himself. The problem with this was at the time the photo was taken, Lord Combermere was being buried in a churchyard a few miles away. He had been killed in an accident just five days before! The photo has defied explanation ever since.

In 1911, spirit photography entered the mainstream with the publication of the book Photographing the Invisible by James Coates. It covered dozens of cases of spirit photographs in detail and was later revised and expanded in 1921. It remains one of the most comprehensive books on the subject during this period and it managed to bring spirit photography into the mainstream for the first time.  Following the publication of the book, several noteworthy articles appeared on spirit photography, including one by James Hyslop, a Columbia University professor. He wrote an introduction to a series of experiments carried out by Charles Cook of two American spirit photographers, Edward Wyllie of Los Angeles and Alex Martin of Denver. Cook did extensive work with the two men in 1916 and provided them with his own plates and had them developed by a commercial studio. In this way, he eliminated any opportunity that the two men might have had to doctor the images. Cook concluded that the photographs submitted were genuine but in these cases thought the name "psychic photography" better matched the phenomenon. He believed that the two men actually produced the images through some psychical means, rather than actually photographing ghosts.

Despite the failure to debunk a number of the spirit photographs of the time, the reality of the photographs was not accepted by the scientists of the day. As it is today, the majority of them simply refused to examine the data and assumed that fraud was more than adequate to explain the findings. One of the few exceptions was Sir William Crookes, the distinguished chemist and physicist. For 30 years, he was a member of the Royal Society and was known for his discovery of thallium, his studies of photography and other scientific work. At the invitation of several skeptical members of the Royal Society, he agreed to take on a six month study of psychic phenomenon. Instead of just six months though, his work continued for years and he came to the conclusion that much of what he studied (including psychic photographs) was genuine. He presented his findings in both book and article form but soon became discouraged about convincing most of his scientific colleagues of the reality of what he was doing. He endured ridicule and disdain, but never wavered from his beliefs. More than 25 years later, he would maintain that spirit photography could, and did, exist.

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