A unique characteristic of photography has always been its ability to record the visible, material world with truth and accuracy. Interestingly, advocates of spiritism at the turn of the last century enlisted photography to provide manifest proof of the immaterial: emanations and auras; thoughts, hallucinations, and dreams; or the spirits of the deceased. Closer to the scientific revelations of the X-ray (discovered in 1896) than to the double-exposure parlor tricks of 1850s ghost photographs, the more than 120 stunning and surprising works in this exhibition reflect an attempt to reconcile the physical and spiritual worlds.
More About This Exhibition
Ghosts, spirit séances, levitation, auras, ectoplasm...extraordinary photographs of these and other paranormal phenomena will be on display in "The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult," an exhibition devoted to the historical intersections between photography and the once wildly popular interest in spiritualism.
"The Perfect Medium" will bring together some 120 photographs culled from public and private archives throughout Europe and North America. The exhibition focuses primarily on the period from the 1860s to World War II, when occult and paranormal phenomena were most actively debated and both supporters and skeptics summoned photographs as evidence. Approaching the material from a historical perspective, the exhibition presents the photographs on their own terms, without authoritative comment on their veracity.
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