Unsuspecting Souls

by Barry Sanders

  Again, the fascination continues. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in September 2005, mounted a show titled The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, a collection of spirit photographs from the nineteenth century. The New York Times retitled the show The Ghost in the Darkroom. In one image, “The Ghost of Bernadette Soubirous,” made around 1890, the subject slowly discorporates as she moves right to left, finally walking through one of those very thick British brick buildings. The star of the show is the very first known spirit photographer, William H. Mumler. Mumler, of New York and Boston, created a photograph for Mary Todd Lincoln of herself sitting next to the ghost image of her husband. The mayor of New York, a staunch disbeliever, ordered an investigation of Mumler’s practices, and in 1869 he went on trial for defrauding the public with his photographs. P. T. Barnum, the man who knew hokum better than anyone else in America, testified for the prosecution—not a good sign. But, with Mary Lincoln’s testimony—after all, he had photographed her dead husband—the jury acquitted Mumler.

  Spirit photography slowly captured the imagination of the public in France and in England. Groups formed to pursue ways of capturing on film the world of spirits. They went by the most wonderful-sounding names: the Society for the Study of Supernormal Pictures; the British College of Psychic Science; and the Occult Committee of the Magic Circle.

  The museum show also features what the nineteenth century called “fluid photographs.” Inspired by James Braid’s theories of animal magnetism, the invisible power that he believed coursed through the body, photographers placed people’s hands on sensitized photograph plates that recorded the body’s essential and basic source of energy, its “effluvia.” Without such basic energy, many adepts believed, the person dies, marking effluvia as one more candidate for the true secret of life.

  In the more modern portion of the show, to prove that spirits still haunt us and can still be captured on a photograph, MoMA presented work done by a Chicago elevator operator, Ted Serios. Under hypnosis, Serios projected images from his mind directly onto Polaroid film. Serios calls his images “thought photographs.” They resemble small clouds of swirling gas. Punch “ghost hunter” into Google and you get scores of entries, many showing contemporary images that purport to document the presence of life from the other side.

  The principal issues in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries remain the same. In an age overwhelmed by one machine or another, we struggle to maintain our faith, to hang on to our essence—no, to find our essence. We write today on computers with light, a version of the ghost writing that began in the nineteenth century. We walk down the street, earpieces in place, seeming to talk to nobody. People on the Internet, on MySpace, or on YouTube take on whatever identity they choose at the moment. Conspiracy theories abound, about rigged elections in Florida or bombed towers in New York City. One website dedicates itself to the hoax of the first walk on the moon.

  We yearn for answers, or even contact, from the beyond—extended, in our own time, to include other planets, or other solar systems. The truth is exhausted on this planet; we have to look elsewhere. Books on astrology, television programs about talking to the departed, highly flamboyant magicians, the proliferation of screens (including those tiny ones on our handheld telephones): All of these, really, are our legacy from the nineteenth century. Doctor Phil holds the hands of millions of Americans each day as they tune in with their sometimes painful search to find their bedrock, essential natures. And again, as in the nineteenth century, so many of us feel so very ghostlike. Just look at the screen; no one is really there—neither beneficent Oprah nor Doctor Feel-Good. It’s a world of pixels, a dance of light. Even my gas pump talks to me these days. With a delete button, the smallest child can be the king of the disappeared, a pint-sized generator of ghosts.

  Every intellectual in the nineteenth century felt compelled to comment on ghosts, or to pursue them outright. Even Karl Marx had the idea of fading human essence in mind when he penned his famous and haunting statement, “All that is solid melts into air.” That short, enigmatic, grammatically awkward assertion, which sounds like Hamlet’s “too too solid flesh” brought up to date, stands as the philosophical equivalent of Byron’s invitation to his guests to write their own ghost stories. Marx’s line, from The Communist Manifesto, makes more sense in the context of what he called the new bourgeois epoch, dominated by a continuing revolution that capitalism itself demanded:Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier times. All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their train of venerable ideas and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become obsolete before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face with sober senses the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men.

  Yes, everything melted: toys and cars and machines, but the most disturbing meltdown came with flesh and blood. The established and solid way that people conceived of their flesh and blood selves had vanished into thin air. Which raises a most compelling question: What made people feel like they were fast disappearing, that they were becoming so insubstantial as to resemble nothing more than ghosts?

  Here, we must think past the usual explanation of the way people’s everyday lives radically changed in the midst of the Industrial Revolution. That argument says that by performing an unending series of repetitive tasks, people more and more resembled disposable parts. Machines degraded people into cogs. I would be foolhardy to dispute such a claim, especially given the deadening routine of assembly-line work even in its most rudimentary stage in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Besides, we have early and shocking evidence to prove the point.

  People who had enjoyed a centuries-long tradition of working with their hands—weavers, spinners, carpenters, and blacksmiths—reacted quickly against wholesale industrialization, and made their feelings known in the most unruly, riotous ways. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, large numbers of them broke into factories all over London and took axes and hammers to the new motorized looms and lathes. Some of them even set off small bombs. The break-ins reached such proportions and turned so violent that factory owners implored Parliament to find a solution to the problem. In their discussions, members of Parliament equated the mayhem with the most heinous of capital crimes, namely murder. After all, the nation’s economy was at stake; a way of life was seriously threatened. And so, in 1812, the legislature took the bold step of extending the death penalty to cover anyone convicted of destroying one of the new industrial machines.

  Technology played its role as a major and obvious snatcher of bodies; people reacted, sometimes violently. But people would have difficulty seeing or describing the most corrosive effects. How does a person protest feelings of malaise or nervousness? No doubt about it, the new world of the nineteenth century—what Thomas Carlyle in 1829 termed for the first time the Mechanical Age—forever altered people’s cognitive realities. A beautifully shocking phrase popular during the period argued that the new technologies, and in particular the train and the motion picture camera, had effected “the annihilation of time and space.”17 While no one knows who first uttered it, that phrase has achieved status as one of the most brilliantly illuminating declarations of the time. Railroad travel and motion pictures led the way in reshaping daily experience; the annihilation of time and space rested on the simultaneous eradication of the human body. Like Dracula and Houdini, the train and the camera were the perfect expressions of an age that became more and more peopled with countless numbers of ghosts.

  THE BODY HAS a history, and it took a radical turn in this period. A steam locomotive, hurtling through space, across time, eliminated any need for a body. The train did all the work. The passenger merely sat back, insulated from the outside, in his or her seat. Looking out the window of a railroad car that sped along at thirty miles an ho
ur, a person saw what might have once been a familiar landscape turn into a rapidly changing, continual series of images. Railroad travel thus reduced the passenger, who perhaps only moments before stepping on the train had participated intimately in the mix of buildings, trees, rocks, animals, and so forth, primarily to a pair of eyes—without the need (or, stranger still, without the capacity) to smell, or taste, or hear.

  Likewise, a person sitting in a movie theater could watch action take place across great chunks of time and space, with no physical effort on his or her part. As the house lights lowered, people’s bodies disappeared, their sense of smell and touch and taste shut down. Of course, it was important for audience members to feel and respond, but only while sitting still, remaining fairly quiet, and gazing at the screen. Motion picture technology, the ultimate succubus, had the uncanny capacity to take human flesh and transform it into a ghostly, ethereal presence—or rather, absence. Gigantic images flickered into incandescent life on the screen every time someone threw the switch on the projector to start its reels spinning around and around.

  In either case, in the train or in the theater, bodies—people’s own fleshy, well-evolved bodies—suddenly mattered little, if at all. Such disembodied experiences represented a radical departure from the farming, laboring body of physical exertion, the one usually associated with the country as opposed to the city. In the ancient world, ecstatic religions claimed responsibility for out-of-body experiences. But here was something quite different. As one historian so pointedly put it, “‘annihilating time and space’ is what most new technologies aspire to do: technology regards the very terms of our bodily existence as burdensome.”18

  Karl Marx took up the concept of time and space’s annihilation, but he indicted the exigencies of capitalism, rather than the intricacies of technology, as the chief executioner. The more quickly entrepreneurs could get their products to market, the more profit they stood to make. Economists preferred to call this stepped-up pace a matter of efficiency. Marx saw it as thoroughly detrimental to living, as the erasure of haptic, touching, intimate, sensual interaction with other human beings: “Capital must on the one side strive to tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse, i.e., to exchange, and conquer the whole earth for its market. It strives on the other hand to annihilate this space with time, i.e., to reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another.”19

  No wonder, then, that with such fantastical imaginings about the world of commerce, we get the first modern corporations. These were nothing more than collections of disparate people abstracted into a single fictive body, an imagined corpus, one that in the past owned material goods—called stock, sometimes livestock—but which goods now had been abstracted into certificates—called shares of stock, numerous and never live. The earliest corporations, like Standard Oil, United States Steel, General Electric, and the Pennsylvania Railroad, quickly became known as titans or giants—larger-than-life Greek demigods—and acquired their substance through capital and power. They gobbled up land and devoured resources with voraciously hearty appetites: By the end of the nineteenth century, roughly three hundred industrial corporations controlled more than forty percent of all manufacturing in the United States. Unlike real people, corporations could not be jailed for wrongdoing. (Of course, as we now know, executives can indeed do time for certain crimes, like fraud or outright theft.) They could only be punished with stiff fines. Corporations followed the logic of money with a vengeance. They avoided the social contract in favor of the bottom line of the business contract. Feelings of discorporation led, in the nineteenth century, quite naturally to the creation of the first huge incorporations.

  Most people only felt the effect of technology, but could not, of course, exert any control over it. By the beginning of the twentieth century, people could talk on telephones, listen to radio broadcasts, and watch motion pictures. One invention in particular, however, allowed people not only to exert great control over its use, but even made them feel a bit artistic, to boot. A great many middle-class people could afford to purchase a handheld camera. And thousands upon thousands of middle-class citizens bought a camera and used it, not only to ground themselves by documenting reality but also to counter feelings of disorientation and displacement by documenting their own existence. The photograph offered proof that things in the world—especially people, and most especially their very own selves—really existed.

  In certain ways, it feels like the nineteenth century invented the eye—not just the actual eye but the mind’s eye, as well. Think of the impressionists and their desire to break reality into constituent colors. Outside of the canvas, at least a dozen different inventions, from the phantasmagoria to the zoetrope, precede the invention of the camera. The period also provides a dozen or more ways to reproduce those photographs, from glass prints and wet prints to tintypes and silver prints. Such attention to picturing reality really came out of a desire to discover how the eye actually functions.

  This was the goal of James McNeill Whistler, who describes having an insight into the way that proper drawing should be done—with the most detail at the center of interest, fading off into less and less detail out at the edges. Hermann von Helmholtz, the German scientist, wrote a treatise on the eye, which he published in English in 1873, titled “The Eye as an Optical Instrument.” He fairly well corroborates Whistler’s intuitions about drawing: “The image we receive with the eye is like a picture, minutely and elaborately finished in the center, but only roughly sketched in at the border.” The camera lens works in the same way.

  In a book about media and spectral visions in the twenty-first century, titled Phantasmagoria, its author, Marina Warner, points to what she calls photographic looking: “ Photographic looking” existed before the appearance of the camera, as several critics have pointed out, and the new medium responded to desires which were articulated in other ways—to order, analyse, and store data, to measure and inventory phenomena, to make memorials of the past. . . . At the same time, it responded to, and amplified, a growing realization that human vision was limited, discriminating, and linked to the vagaries of memory, and that a machine might be able to see more, more clearly.

  The story of the invention of the camera takes up almost the entire century. It takes some time to tell.

  To begin with, in 1826, a Frenchman named Joseph Nicéphore Niépce produced the first photographic image, using a camera obscura. The image required a continuous eight-hour exposure to sunlight, prompting Niépce to call his process heliography. But even then, even with all that intense light, the image gradually faded. Niépce died in 1833, but his partner, a chemist and artist named Louis Daguerre, continued his work, and in 1839, Daguerre succeeded in creating the first image that did not fade. But, true to the inherent power of technology, Daguerre did more than create a sense of permanency for his images. He cut the exposure time for making lasting images from eight hours to just around thirty minutes.

  Daguerre printed his images on highly polished silver-coated copper sheets, so that to see anything at all the viewer had to tilt the sheet up and down until the image came into view—actually the image seemed to appear only by being coaxed, as if it were a ghost hovering into focus. Marina Warner says about such a particularly ghostly image that “[t]his spectral effect, intrinsic to the medium, provoked frissons from its first appearance, so much so that many early examples are hand-tinted to give bloom to the sitter’s cheeks and lips, or gilded to enliven a cushion, a fob, a pair of earrings.” The daguerreotype made a ghost of the person photographed and then the photographer helped bring that person back to life by adding color and highlights to the print.

  The magic of photographic reproduction, this idea of literally writing with light, caught on fast. By 1840, one year after Daguerre’s invention, an American named Alexander S. Wolcott had received the first patent for a portable camera. The following year, 1841, William Henry Fox Talbot, a native of London, received a patent for something he called a co
llotype, the first negative/positive process, making possible something truly revolutionary, the production of multiple images from a single exposure. By the time we get to pop art, Andy Warhol exploits this kind of cheapening of the original through its repetition as the subject of his silkscreen prints of Elizabeth Taylor, Mao, and other celebrities.

  Following Talbot’s innovation, it then took some forty years of technological change to allow people to own their very own cameras, each change, just as today, lowering the price a bit more and widening the audience even more. In 1880, George Eastman, a New York businessman, received an American patent for his film on a roll, and in 1888 he made his relatively inexpensive camera, the Kodak, available in greengroceries, apothecaries, and general stores. The camera, more commonly known by its brand name, the Kodak—compare Kleenex and the Frigidaire—immediately caught the imagination of the general public. Eastman’s advertising motto enjoyed an enormous popularity because it tapped into the power of technology’s ability to take life into the future and to made it so much simpler; with a slick marketing two-step, it also make the consumer feel that he or she was in total control: “You press the button, we do the rest.”

  The first Kodak sold for fifteen dollars and came with enough film to take one hundred pictures. Eastman made it small enough, light enough, and simple enough to use, so that the average person—he did not want to sell to professionals—could take a picture of almost anything he or she wished. After people took their one hundred exposures, they sent their cameras back to Eastman Kodak, in Rochester, New York, where the factory would develop the prints, fill the camera again with film, and send the finished prints to the customer. A person could buy into this elaborate process all for a processing fee of fifteen dollars.