Capturing Spirits
In Sybell Corbet’s photograph of the library at Combermere Abbey, the whole picture has an overexposed aura, details emerging not from gloom but from the light. A round table is piled with books and flowers and a framed photograph; to its right, a small chair; to its left, a grander one, almost a throne, with finely worked armrests and a tall back; a fine lamp placed above it for the reader's convenience; and in it the translucent figure of a man, formally dressed, apparently looking down at the book in his invisible left hand, only his right arm and upper body shimmering into sight.
Now as we are surrounded constantly by photography and video, and anybody who can afford a telephone can make high quality images of their own in a fraction of a second, it is difficult to imagine the surprise and the fear – the awe, you could say – that the first photographs must have inspired in their viewers: the sense that they were witnessing the results not of the latest advances in science, but rather some supernatural process.
Even as the first examples of what we would recognise as photographs were being produced, and the medium was developing in numerous places with astonishing rapidity, the German newspaper Leipziger Stadtanzeiger, in 1839, was declaring confidently that ‘the wish to capture evanescent reflections is not only impossible… but the mere desire alone, the will to do so, is blasphemy.’ We can say for certain that they were wrong about the first part, but who are we to judge the second? Certainly there is something magical or at least alchemical about the photographic process, as anyone who has watched the images appear in darkroom trays can attest.
Much more recently, the writer WG Sebald who made great use of photography in his own work described it as ‘nothing but a way of making ghostly apparitions materialise by means of a very dubious magical art.’ Given the inherent improbability and the seemingly otherworldly nature of the whole practice, it is hardly surprising that almost as soon as cameras became available to the general public, people were using them to try and take pictures of ghosts. If the developing agent can bring to the surface the latent images on the paper, then why not the images latent in reality itself?
Of course, a great number of these attempts were deliberate fraud, playing on the credulity of the bereaved. Society photographers such as Fredrick Hudson and William Hope in Britain and Édouard Buguet in France manipulated their images using prepared photographic plates or simply with physical props. To the modern eye, most of these appear to be absurdly staged. More haunting than this so-called spirit photography – which generally took place in conveniently darkened studios – is the ghost photography done in the field, as it were, in places which already had a history of haunting. The very long exposure times required by early photographic technology meant that a person walking in front of the lens, or pausing there for a little while, could leave translucent traces of themself on the developed image, while accidental or deliberate double exposures can give the impression of a person floating in mid-air, smoky and blurred at the edges. As the technology has changed and developed, so too have the ghosts; digital ghost photography captures not humanoid spectres but rather mysterious orbs, streaks or strands of light caused by the bounce of the camera flash off dust particles or rain. You can know all of this logically and still be entranced at the results.
I took up analogue photography at a time when I was thinking a great deal about haunting. When my father died quite suddenly a few years ago, I realised I was thinking about the allotment plot which he cultivated for decades almost as a shrine, a place of remembrance. I began to understand that you do not have to literally believe in an afterlife or a spirit world to feel the presence of someone who has died in a place that they put so much of themselves into. How many inches of this soil, I found myself wondering, had been worked by his hands? When we dug up the leeks that he had grown from seed and planted out in neat rows, what of him was in them?
Once the initial shock of grief had faded, I began to feel a responsibility to document my father as a person – or rather my memories and impressions of him – as thoroughly as I could, to set down on the page the granularity of his existence as it was there on the allotment plot. His death had come so suddenly that it felt like a rupture in reality; if something so apparently solid and distinct as a living person can suddenly not be one any more, then maybe, you think – or at least, I thought – maybe nothing is as solid or as distinct as it seems, and all that lasts is the records we keep. Once I had written everything I could, I still felt as though there was something I hadn’t expressed, some aspect of my father or of my grief that hadn’t made it into words, that could not survive the intervention of the thinking mind but could maybe be captured in a black-and-white image, what Sebald referred to as ‘a document of absence.’
So I began to take photographs, which soon became a record of the plot in more ways than one. I read about the research of The Sustainable Darkroom project, which looks for ways to reduce the ecological impact of analogue photography, and was thrilled to discover, given my own background in fermentation, that film could be developed in a mixture of fermented vegetable extracts and a few household chemicals. Now that I could take pictures of the plants and structures of the allotment and develop them with a solution made from those same plants, the allotment’s light revealed in its matter; a perfect alchemy for raising ghosts. My amateur attempts at developing, and the uncertainty that comes with the many variables that govern fermentation, also left a space for chance to creep in. It is impossible to say at this distance if Corbett’s spectral reader (assuming he is not actually a ghost) was the result of deliberate direction from the photographer or somebody wandering by accident into the frame during the hour-long exposure. But it is certain that the majority of ghost photography (as opposed to the staged spirit photography) is the result of chance, of the noise that emerges from the shortcomings of the medium.
An artichoke in flower. Photo by author
Double exposures can happen through deliberate manipulation or user error; dust on the lens; tricks of the light; mistakes made in the darkroom – through these cracks in the scientific process of capturing and developing a photograph, ghosts can get in. In front of me is a photograph of an artichoke in flower, the head opened to reveal itself a thistle, an abandoned wheelbarrow upright to one side. The picture as a whole appears veiled, some mist breaking only at the edges to give a clearer glimpse of the scene. Another shows the crabapple tree we planted to give some natural help to the hodgepodge of festival fencing, bits of pallet and various hedgerow plants that separate the allotment from the surrounding footpaths. On the right hand side of the photograph, beads of light seem to be moving onto the scene, either from the edge of the picture or from somehow behind it, blurred through movement. If I know that the proximate causes of these phenomena are patchy development from an imperfectly dissolved developing solution and physical damage to the film from my own rough handling of it, then so what? Under the harsh light of modernity, ghosts must take any route they can to make their presence known to the living.
Do I believe that? I’m not sure, but here are the facts: one purpose of photography is to set down and show to others the world as seen by the photographer. The allotment, for me, is a place filled with memories of the work and presence of my father. If the photographs I have taken at the allotment and imperfectly developed using materials picked at the allotment and fermented in rainwater collected at the allotment express something of that presence, that haunting, then it is reasonable to call them ghost photography. They do not show the coherent spirit of my father or any other former plot-holder, but then, I do not think that people persist in that way. Rather, they show something of how memory or consciousness linger, in our own minds as much as in what we perceive as the exterior world. That is what a scientist would say; what my father would have said. But the logic of haunting is not the logic of science – it is the logic of grief, the desperation of it.
When I received the phone call from my brother to tell me our father had died, when I was on the train into town, even as I looked at his body in the hospice bed, I was thinking that maybe there was some mistake. I had misheard. He would get better again. We see ghosts because we want to see them, and we take photographs of them as some final record, some assurance that a person is not lost forever. Somewhere in the madness of early grief, a part of me did think that there was something magical in what I was doing, that I could somehow bring my father back to life by writing about him. That feeling passed as soon as I had finished the book, and what remains is the haunting, these still images I have made; the memory that lodges in their damage and imperfections.
Now as we are surrounded constantly by photography and video, and anybody who can afford a telephone can make high quality images of their own in a fraction of a second, it is difficult to imagine the surprise and the fear – the awe, you could say – that the first photographs must have inspired in their viewers: the sense that they were witnessing the results not of the latest advances in science, but rather some supernatural process.
Even as the first examples of what we would recognise as photographs were being produced, and the medium was developing in numerous places with astonishing rapidity, the German newspaper Leipziger Stadtanzeiger, in 1839, was declaring confidently that ‘the wish to capture evanescent reflections is not only impossible… but the mere desire alone, the will to do so, is blasphemy.’ We can say for certain that they were wrong about the first part, but who are we to judge the second? Certainly there is something magical or at least alchemical about the photographic process, as anyone who has watched the images appear in darkroom trays can attest.
Much more recently, the writer WG Sebald who made great use of photography in his own work described it as ‘nothing but a way of making ghostly apparitions materialise by means of a very dubious magical art.’ Given the inherent improbability and the seemingly otherworldly nature of the whole practice, it is hardly surprising that almost as soon as cameras became available to the general public, people were using them to try and take pictures of ghosts. If the developing agent can bring to the surface the latent images on the paper, then why not the images latent in reality itself?
Of course, a great number of these attempts were deliberate fraud, playing on the credulity of the bereaved. Society photographers such as Fredrick Hudson and William Hope in Britain and Édouard Buguet in France manipulated their images using prepared photographic plates or simply with physical props. To the modern eye, most of these appear to be absurdly staged. More haunting than this so-called spirit photography – which generally took place in conveniently darkened studios – is the ghost photography done in the field, as it were, in places which already had a history of haunting. The very long exposure times required by early photographic technology meant that a person walking in front of the lens, or pausing there for a little while, could leave translucent traces of themself on the developed image, while accidental or deliberate double exposures can give the impression of a person floating in mid-air, smoky and blurred at the edges. As the technology has changed and developed, so too have the ghosts; digital ghost photography captures not humanoid spectres but rather mysterious orbs, streaks or strands of light caused by the bounce of the camera flash off dust particles or rain. You can know all of this logically and still be entranced at the results.
I took up analogue photography at a time when I was thinking a great deal about haunting. When my father died quite suddenly a few years ago, I realised I was thinking about the allotment plot which he cultivated for decades almost as a shrine, a place of remembrance. I began to understand that you do not have to literally believe in an afterlife or a spirit world to feel the presence of someone who has died in a place that they put so much of themselves into. How many inches of this soil, I found myself wondering, had been worked by his hands? When we dug up the leeks that he had grown from seed and planted out in neat rows, what of him was in them?
Once the initial shock of grief had faded, I began to feel a responsibility to document my father as a person – or rather my memories and impressions of him – as thoroughly as I could, to set down on the page the granularity of his existence as it was there on the allotment plot. His death had come so suddenly that it felt like a rupture in reality; if something so apparently solid and distinct as a living person can suddenly not be one any more, then maybe, you think – or at least, I thought – maybe nothing is as solid or as distinct as it seems, and all that lasts is the records we keep. Once I had written everything I could, I still felt as though there was something I hadn’t expressed, some aspect of my father or of my grief that hadn’t made it into words, that could not survive the intervention of the thinking mind but could maybe be captured in a black-and-white image, what Sebald referred to as ‘a document of absence.’
So I began to take photographs, which soon became a record of the plot in more ways than one. I read about the research of The Sustainable Darkroom project, which looks for ways to reduce the ecological impact of analogue photography, and was thrilled to discover, given my own background in fermentation, that film could be developed in a mixture of fermented vegetable extracts and a few household chemicals. Now that I could take pictures of the plants and structures of the allotment and develop them with a solution made from those same plants, the allotment’s light revealed in its matter; a perfect alchemy for raising ghosts. My amateur attempts at developing, and the uncertainty that comes with the many variables that govern fermentation, also left a space for chance to creep in. It is impossible to say at this distance if Corbett’s spectral reader (assuming he is not actually a ghost) was the result of deliberate direction from the photographer or somebody wandering by accident into the frame during the hour-long exposure. But it is certain that the majority of ghost photography (as opposed to the staged spirit photography) is the result of chance, of the noise that emerges from the shortcomings of the medium.
Double exposures can happen through deliberate manipulation or user error; dust on the lens; tricks of the light; mistakes made in the darkroom – through these cracks in the scientific process of capturing and developing a photograph, ghosts can get in. In front of me is a photograph of an artichoke in flower, the head opened to reveal itself a thistle, an abandoned wheelbarrow upright to one side. The picture as a whole appears veiled, some mist breaking only at the edges to give a clearer glimpse of the scene. Another shows the crabapple tree we planted to give some natural help to the hodgepodge of festival fencing, bits of pallet and various hedgerow plants that separate the allotment from the surrounding footpaths. On the right hand side of the photograph, beads of light seem to be moving onto the scene, either from the edge of the picture or from somehow behind it, blurred through movement. If I know that the proximate causes of these phenomena are patchy development from an imperfectly dissolved developing solution and physical damage to the film from my own rough handling of it, then so what? Under the harsh light of modernity, ghosts must take any route they can to make their presence known to the living.
Do I believe that? I’m not sure, but here are the facts: one purpose of photography is to set down and show to others the world as seen by the photographer. The allotment, for me, is a place filled with memories of the work and presence of my father. If the photographs I have taken at the allotment and imperfectly developed using materials picked at the allotment and fermented in rainwater collected at the allotment express something of that presence, that haunting, then it is reasonable to call them ghost photography. They do not show the coherent spirit of my father or any other former plot-holder, but then, I do not think that people persist in that way. Rather, they show something of how memory or consciousness linger, in our own minds as much as in what we perceive as the exterior world. That is what a scientist would say; what my father would have said. But the logic of haunting is not the logic of science – it is the logic of grief, the desperation of it.
When I received the phone call from my brother to tell me our father had died, when I was on the train into town, even as I looked at his body in the hospice bed, I was thinking that maybe there was some mistake. I had misheard. He would get better again. We see ghosts because we want to see them, and we take photographs of them as some final record, some assurance that a person is not lost forever. Somewhere in the madness of early grief, a part of me did think that there was something magical in what I was doing, that I could somehow bring my father back to life by writing about him. That feeling passed as soon as I had finished the book, and what remains is the haunting, these still images I have made; the memory that lodges in their damage and imperfections.